Motion Alters Color Appearance

Chromatic induction compellingly demonstrates that chromatic context as well as spectral lights
reflected from an object determines its color appearance. Here, we show that when one colored object
moves around an identical stationary object, the perceived saturation of the stationary object decreases
dramatically whereas the saturation of the moving object increases. These color appearance shifts in
the opposite directions suggest that normalization induced by the object’s motion may mediate the
shift in color appearance. We ruled out other plausible alternatives such as local adaptation, attention,
and transient neural responses that could explain the color shift without assuming interaction between
color and motion processing. These results demonstrate that the motion of an object affects both its
own color appearance and the color appearance of a nearby object, suggesting a tight coupling between
color and motion processing.