There are various other human factors to keep in mind about colors; e.g., color deficiencies, our perceptual limitations in comparing shades of color, our tendencies to see “patterns that are not there” as well as the so called information overload are real threats for the success of your visualization.
Besides colors, pattern/feature recognition can be affected by presence of presence of shadows in your visualizations. Presence of shadow can change the way we see colors (..), thus, in such cases, seriously mislead us. The influence of shadows in pattern recognition is also very pronounced in some forms of 3D and pseudo-3D (2.5D) visualizations. If you are trying to judge 3D spatial relationships and if there is (artificial or natural) shadow in the scene, it will potentially (and strongly) affect the perception of concavity and convexity; thus may lead to misinterpretations. This effect can be observed concretely in what is termed seriously mislead us. The influence of shadows in pattern recognition is also very pronounced in some forms of 3D and pseudo-3D (2.5D) visualizations. If you are trying to judge 3D spatial relationships and if there is (artificial or natural) shadow in the scene, it will potentially (and strongly) affect the perception of concavity and convexity; thus may lead to misinterpretations. This effect can be observed concretely in what is termed relief inversion, and in terrain-like visualizations; terrain reversal effect (e.g. Bernabe & Coltekin 2014, Figure 5). The illusion reverses the convex and concave shapes in the entire scene and is closely linked to cognitive factors such as familiarity and assumption of where the light source is, and can be experienced also with faces, known as hollow mask illusion (***, Figure ***)