The Perceived Atmosphere of Coloured Lighting: Sensory, Emotional, and Cross-Modal Effects

How coloured lighting affects the perceived atmosphere of a scene is important to many fields of
research and application, including cognitive, work and health psychology, vision science, computer
science and engineering, marketing, design and architecture, urban planning, art and film studies. A
challenge of investigating lighting effects is the fact that knowledge about lighting is often implicit, as
illustrated by the famous colour-switching #theDress. Additionally, the perceived atmosphere is difficult
to measure because it is a holistic impression, i.e., it combines a large range of perceptual and affective
responses in one global, spontaneous impression. In this project, we develop a new, comprehensive
approach to assess how coloured light contributes to the creation of perceived atmosphere. In one
subproject, we examine the sensory effects of coloured light on the visual quality of colours in a scene
(rendering). In the second subproject, we investigate how implicit memory of past experiences gives rise
to the affective responses to coloured lighting. We measure the "Semantic Light Field", i.e., the ensemble
of concepts semantically related to coloured lighting, and test a quantitative model to predict the
affective components of the perceived atmosphere based on the semantic light field. In the third
subproject, we extend our investigations to other perceptual features, such as movement and sound, and
test the idea of "Cross-Modal Harmony" with parametrized videos ("Moving Rothkos"). Findings will
contribute to the assessment and understanding of the effects of coloured lighting on perceived
atmosphere across domains of research and application.