Smitty Stevens’ Test of Retinex Theory

This paper describes an experiment that Smitty performed while I was giving the William James lectures at Harvard. It was a modification of Craik’s and Cornsweet’s experiments using mixtures of red and blue instead of black and white. Smitty’s experiment tested whether the colors produced were the colors one would expect from the predictions of Retinex theory. This paper describes the experiment, the predictions, and the results.