2026 Boynton Lecture

The 2026 Boynton Lecture will be given by Karl Gegenfurtner, Professor of Psychology, Giessen University, Germany.

Named in honour of the late Robert M. Boynton, the award recognises outstanding contributions to vision science. Most people can hope to make a significant contribution to perhaps one main area of vision science: Professor Gegenfurtner has made groundbreaking contributions in both colour vision and eye-movement research, linking low-level sensory processes, higher level visual cognition, and sensorimotor integration. Aligned with Boynton’s legacy in colour vision research, Professor Gegenfurtner has emphasized the direct role of colour in many aspects of visual processing from image segmentation to high level object recognition and memory. His work underlines the significance of colour at the core of our visual abilities - highlighting the colour characteristics of natural stimuli and interactions with shape, form, orientation and motion perception. Most recently he has been combining his interests in eye-movements, active perception and colour research in both real and virtual environments.

In recognition of this body of work, Professor Gegenfurtner was elected into the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina in 2015, received the Wilhelm-Wundt medal of the German Psychological Association (DGPS) in 2016, and the International Colour Vision Society (ICVS) Verriest Medal in 2024. We are delighted to host him to deliver the Boynton Lecture at the 2026 Optica Fall Vision Meeting.

Professor Gegenfurtner's talk will be Friday, September 25 at 5:00pm.

Karl Gegenfurtner, Professor of Psychology, Giessen University, Germany

2026 Boynton Leture: A metric for color space: Beating the curse of dimensionality

Despite almost a century of work on color discrimination, a complete empirical metric for three-dimensional color space has remained elusive. The central problem is the curse of dimensionality: conventional threshold measurements are too slow to characterize discrimination throughout the full color volume. I will describe three complementary approaches that are beginning to overcome this limitation. First, we have established an empirical metric field for three-dimensional RGB color space by measuring notably qualitative differences at a lattice of reference colors. Local discrimination ellipsoids define symmetric positive-definite metric tensors, allowing the measurements to be represented and interpolated as a tensor field. Second, immersive VR experiments inspired by the game Beat Saber show how discrimination measurements can be embedded in rapid, naturalistic visuomotor behavior while retaining the structure of classical psychophysics. Third, the Colympics family of games extends this approach to scalable data collection, making it possible to sample many more colors, observers, and experimental conditions than conventional laboratory methods allow. Together, these approaches move color science from sparse local threshold measurements toward a densely sampled empirical metric of three-dimensional color space, including its variation across observers and viewing conditions.

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