Here is an excerpt. I saw Land do this deomonstration.
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Nathans vividly remembers demonstrations of this "color constancy" by the
late Edwin Land, the inventor of instant photography and founder of the
Polaroid Corporation. Land and his colleagues had made a large collage of
multi-colored geometric shapes, called a "Mondrian" after its resemblance to
the works of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. They used three projectors
that beamed light matching the wavelength-sensitivity of the three human
cone types. With these projectors, the exact wavelength composition
reflected from any given patch on the Mondrian could be exactly controlled.
"Land pointed out a patch on the Mondrian that looked orange in the context
of the surrounding colors," Nathans recalls. "Then he gave me a tube, like
the tube inside a paper towel roll, and had me look at this patch in
isolation. And it wasn't orange anymore. It was a perfect red."
The patch was in fact painted orange, but Land had beamed a high-intensity
long-wave light from the red end of the spectrum on it so that it reflected
a high proportion of red light. Under normal viewing conditions,
however-when the patch was surrounded by other Mondrian colors-Nathans still
saw the orange figure by its true color.
Somehow, by comparing a patch of color to the surrounding colored region,
the brain is able to discount the wavelength of the illuminating light and
reconstruct the patch's real daylight color.
"Color constancy is the most important property of the color system,"
declares neurobiologist Semir Zeki of University College, London. Color
would be a poor way of labeling objects if the perceived colors kept
shifting under different conditions, he points out. But the eye is not a
camera. Instead, the eye-brain pathway constitutes a kind of computer-vastly
more complex and powerful than any that human engineers have built-designed
to construct a stable visual representation of reality.
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For more information about the engineering model.
These two models are not completely consistent, however the engineering
model does a decent job of explaining color reproduction in TV, pictures,
... while the color constancy model explains the real life sensations of
color.