Welcome

You have reached the website of Annette Werner and the ColourLab.

Human colour perception is a construction of the brain, rather than a 1:1 translation of incoming sensory information. This is impressively demonstrated by visual illusions like #thedress (different viewers report extremely different colour percepts (e.g.white&gold or blue &black) when viewing the identical picture of a dress, see picture on the right) or the phenomenon of colour constancy (colours of objects remain approximately constant despite significant changes of the illumination).

Research in the ColourLab aims to understand the cortical processes and pathways involved in the emergence of colour perception, with a particular focus on colour constancy and object recognition in real scenes, and colour ambiguities (e.g. #thedress). In cooperation with industry The ColourLab advises on the use of colour for human-machine communication, e.g. in autonomous vehicles. In an aim to understand general principles of colour coding, we also take an interspecies approach and study colour and object recognition in the honeybee Apis mellifera, a fascinating invertebrate animal model for perception, learning and cognition.

The results of this research are applicable in the development and refinement of artificial visual systems (e.g. drones, robotics), medical applications (e.g. visual protheses) and new technologies in VR and AR.

The Colourlab, previously located at the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics Tübingen, Department for Physiology of Cogntive Processes, has now moved to the Departement of Evolutionary Cognitive Sciences at Tübingen University.

Interested in colour research? We offer courses on human and animal colour vision as well as practicals on behavioural experiments on bees vision and cognition. Applications for bachelor or master are wellcome - contact us!

Also, if you want to learn more about colour psychophysics - come and join us for some experiments! We are constantly looking for test -subjects for our psychophysical experiments (e.g. testing colour discrimination, contrast sensitivity or the perception of object colours under changing illuminations).