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Can what we know change what we see? A line of research stretching back nearly a century suggests that knowing an object’s canonical color can alter its visual appearance, such that objectively gray bananas appear to be tinged with yellow, and objectively orange hearts appear redder than they really are. Such “memory color” effects have constituted the strongest and most complete evidence that basic sensory processing can be penetrated by higher-level knowledge, and have contributed to theories of object perception in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Are such phenomena truly perceptual? Or could they instead reflect shifts in judgments and responses without altering online color perception? Here, we take a novel approach to this question by exploiting a “logic” that is inherent in visual processing but that higher-level cognition often cannot follow. In four experiments spanning both classical and …