The pattern-color separable model is associated with three theoretical mechanisms that have well-defined color and pattern responsivities. Because the model fits the data reasonably well, we explored the properties of these three mechanisms. We found that the pattern-color separable mechanisms we infer from these color-matches have an opponent-colors structure. The all-positive mechanism has a bandpass pattern-responsivity function and the two chromatic mechanisms have lowpass pattern-responsivity functions.
The pattern-color separable model provides a good first-order approximation to these low spatial frequency targets and their mixtures, although certain aspects of the data are not perfectly described by the model. Specifically, the model performs less well near threshold and there are certain reliable deviations when measuring the mixtures of simple patterns.