Project · 2025 · In progress
The Blue is Sky: Sensory Alignment & Perceptual Drift
Research into how altered visual conditions reshape colour perception, learned categories, and adaptive machine vision.
Overview
The Blue is Sky program asks whether sustained changes in visual input can reorganise colour perception over time. Rather than treating colour as a fixed property of light, we study it as a learned and adaptive structure shaped by environment, memory, and use.
This work extends the lab’s broader claim that qualia are not static mental atoms. They are built through repeated contact with the world. If that is true, then colour categories, affective tone, and recognition should remain more plastic than conventional models assume.
Research question
We explore whether engineered changes to viewing conditions can produce durable shifts in how people name, remember, discriminate, and feel colour. The aim is to understand how much of colour experience is stabilised by learning, and how much can be revised through adaptation.
Colour gives us a rare bridge between philosophy, psychophysics, and interface design. It lets us ask a deep question in a form that can still be studied behaviorally: when the structure of visual experience changes, what in perception changes with it?
Current direction
The project combines controlled changes in visual input with longitudinal measurement of perceptual adaptation and computational models of perceptual change. We are building experimental platforms that let us study colour cognition under modified viewing conditions without reducing the work to a single task or metric.
Current work focuses on how category boundaries, salience, memory, and affective associations shift across time under altered sensory conditions. The practical question is whether new colour distinctions can become stable parts of experience rather than momentary curiosities.
Why it matters
If colour experience is more adaptable than we assume, that matters far beyond one research program. It changes how we think about consciousness, perceptual learning, sensory rehabilitation, creative software, and the design of machine perception systems that need to operate alongside human judgment.
The project also provides a concrete test case for the lab’s broader theory that perception is relational and learned. Colour is the cleanest place to study that claim because the categories are familiar, emotionally loaded, and deeply entangled with environment.
Potential applications
Beyond basic science, the work may inform new tools for visualisation, accessibility, interface design, and adaptive machine vision. It also feeds the essays, installations, and computational systems through which NightCity Labs studies how humans and machines learn to perceive structured worlds.