My guess here, to help it make sense, perhaps think in terms of the luminous excitation of "blacklight paint"... If she's having strong reactions, probably to metamers under the right lighting in a real-world environment and not constrained by the gamut of a defined colorspace like some flavor of CMYK or RGB...
Here's a real question for her on the subject, how does she see a blacklight? I expect a true tetrachromat to see it nearly white. But also I wonder if she's sensing a fluorescing that is of sufficiently short wavelength that standard vision can not perceive it.
The implants I have in each eye are different technologies. The right eye has no UV filter, the IOL in the left eye does have a UV filter. When I look at a blacklight with my right eye, it's bright, almost white in appearance.
But looking at the blacklight with my left eye, it looks like what most see, as a very dark purple with almost no visible light.
A friend of mine is an artist who has been experimenting with extreme metamerism, using pigments that radically change perceived color under different light sources, including of course, blacklight.
Since you mention hiking, I wonder if some of the plant life you and your wife encounter have any florescent properties, or perhaps interact with some fungus that does... A portable UV light at night might be interesting...
Here's a real question for her on the subject, how does she see a blacklight? I expect a true tetrachromat to see it nearly white. But also I wonder if she's sensing a fluorescing that is of sufficiently short wavelength that standard vision can not perceive it.
The implants I have in each eye are different technologies. The right eye has no UV filter, the IOL in the left eye does have a UV filter. When I look at a blacklight with my right eye, it's bright, almost white in appearance.
But looking at the blacklight with my left eye, it looks like what most see, as a very dark purple with almost no visible light.
A friend of mine is an artist who has been experimenting with extreme metamerism, using pigments that radically change perceived color under different light sources, including of course, blacklight.
Since you mention hiking, I wonder if some of the plant life you and your wife encounter have any florescent properties, or perhaps interact with some fungus that does... A portable UV light at night might be interesting...