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Colour for behavioural success

Colour information not only helps sustain the survival of animal species by guiding sexual selection and foraging behaviour, but also is an important factor in the cultural and technological development of our own species. This is illustrated by examples from the visual arts and from state-of-the-art imaging technology, where the strategic use of colour has become a powerful tool for guiding the planning and execution of interventional procedures. The functional role of colour information in terms of its potential benefits to behavioural success across the species is addressed in the introduction here to clarify why colour perception may have evolved to generate behavioural success. It is argued that evolutionary and environmental pressures influence not only colour trait production in the different species, but also their ability to process and exploit colour information for goal-specific purposes. We then leap straight to the human primate with insight from current research on the facilitating role of colour cues on performance training with precision technology for image-guided surgical planning and intervention. It is shown that local colour cues in 2D images generated by a surgical fisheye camera help individuals become more precise rapidly across a limited number of trial sets in simulator training for specific manual gestures with a tool. The progressively facilitating effect of a local colour cue on performance evolution in a video controlled simulator task can be explained in terms of colour-based figure-ground segregation guiding attention towards local image parts, with an immediate cost on performance time, and a lasting long-term benefit in terms of greater task precision.