The average color in a scene is a potentially important cue to the illuminant and thus for color constancy, but it remains unknown how well and in what ways observers can estimate the mean chromaticity. We examined this by measuring the variability in "achromatic" settings for stimuli composed of different distributions of colors with varying contrast ranges along the luminance, SvsLM, and LvsM cardinal axes. Observers adjusted the mean chromaticity of the palette to set the average to gray. Variability in the settings increased as chromatic contrast or (to a lesser extent) luminance contrast increased. Signals along the cardinal axes are relatively independent in many detection and discrimination tasks, but showed strong interference in the white estimates. This "cross-masking" and the effects of chromatic variance in general may occur because observers cannot explicitly perceive or represent the mean of a set of qualitatively different hues (e.g., that red and green hues average to gray), and thus may infer the mean only indirectly (e.g., from the relative saturation of different hues).

中文翻译：

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颜色差异和消色差设置。

场景中的平均颜色是光源的潜在重要线索，因此对于颜色的恒定性也很重要，但是仍然未知的是观察者能够以何种方式以及以何种方式估计平均色度。我们通过测量“消色差”设置中由不同颜色分布组成的刺激的变化来检查这一点，这些颜色分布具有沿亮度，SvsLM和LvsM主轴变化的对比度范围。观察者调整了调色板的平均色度，将平均值设置为灰色。设置的可变性随色度对比度或（在较小程度上）亮度对比度增加而增加。沿基轴的信号在许多检测和识别任务中相对独立，但在白色估计中显示出强烈的干扰。这种“交叉掩盖”