Do people match surface reflectance fundamentally differently than they match emitted light?

We compared matches between colours that were both presented on a computer monitor or both as pieces of paper, with matching the colour of a piece of paper with a colour presented on a computer monitor and vice versa. Performance was specifically poor when setting an image on a computer monitor to match the colour of a piece of paper. This cannot be due to any of the individual judgments because subjects readily selected a matching piece of paper to match another piece of paper and set the image on the monitor to match another image on a monitor. We propose that matching the light reaching the eye and matching surface reflectance are fundamentally different judgments and that subjects can sometimes but not always choose which to match. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.