After publishing his book on the role of eye movements in vision, Yarbus intended to write a second book summarizing his data on colour perception (that remained beyond the range of his first book) and to present his own original theory of colour vision and, perhaps, more than that — a general theory of vision. Evidently, this task appeared to be more difficult than it seemed originally — there was a pause of about ten years between completing the manuscript of the first book in 1964 and publishing the first paper from the series (1975-1980) related to the second one (not realized). During this time, Yarbus only rarely performed the experiments having direct relation to the content of the planned book. Meanwhile, Yarbus’s ideas came into great prominence in Russia.
In the last series of papers, published between 1975 and 1980, Yarbus tried to formulate general conceptions concerning the basic principles of retinal image processing in the human visual system. The original ideas were based on the results of his numerous and varied experiments carried out with extraordinary inventiveness and great skill. Being concentrated primarily on the problems of colour vision, Alfred Yarbus dreamed of elaborating a comprehensive model that would simulate visual information processing at the monocular precognitive level in the visual system of humans with normal trichromatic colour perception. Recently, Yarbus’s experimental paradigms, findings, statements, and conclusions were considered in relation to the classical theories of colour perception and, in particular, fundamental theses of the Nyberg school. Though the perceptual model developed by Yarbus remained incomplete it is already evident that some intrinsic contradictions make it inadequate in terms of comprehensive modeling. However, certain partial advantages deserve more thorough appreciation and further investigation. A more detailed account can be found in Nikolaev and Rozhkova (2015).
During the last period of his research career, Yarbus was mainly interested in finishing his new monograph on colour perception. He published a series of 10 papers on colour perception in Biophysics (1975-1980) but his project remained uncompleted.