Colour Perception II

The notion that we all see the colours in the same way seems obvious. What i perceive as green is identical to what you perceive as green. But how can we know for sure? An interesting video that discusses this topic can be located below by vsauce on youtube. To perhaps shed light on the subject, I suggest an experiment. My hypothesis is that colour vision evolved to help our ancestors identify food primarily. If this is the case, then the colours as we perceive them should be optimised to making things like fruit stand out against foliage or other various environments. To start, we could have our control image be a normal picture with unchanged colours be presented to a series of subjects. They would then have to identify as many potential food sources as possible. Next, the image could be adjusted so that all colours are rotated by the same amount around the colour wheel in the same direction by x, preserving the relative locations of each colour to each other colour contained in the image. This would be repeated multiple times and various subjects would repeatedly attempt to identify potential food sources. I believe the results would show that the optimum capability for finding food would hover very near the colours as they appear in the control image. The conclusion that could be drawn is that evolution has whittled down those who did not sense colour in the way the majority does because it is not as effective. This could be backed up by brain scans of people who would be shown colours in an MRI machine. If the scans matched significantly, it would show the same perceptual process is being undertaken by each individual. In summary, the reason my red is the same as your red, as well as our greens and all others being the same is because this maximises contrast between food and non-food, whereas people who aren't able to perceive colour like you or me where less effective at finding the necessary food. Vsauce Colour Perception Video