The eponym Hering's afterimage refers to the German psychologist and physiologist Karl Ewald Konstantin Hering (1834-1918). It is used to denote a "positive afterimage that appears first in a temporal sequence of " afterimages resulting from a brief light stimulus. Thus Hering's afterimage has the same relative brightness relations as the primary optical stimulus. The term is used in opposition to "Purkinje afterimage (the second in the temporal sequence of afterimages) and " Hess afterimage (the third in this sequence). Hering's afterimage can also be classified as a " physiological illusion.
References
Brown, J.L. (1965). Afterimages.In: Vision and visual perception. Edited by Graham, C.H. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
Dictionary of Hallucinations. J.D. Blom. 2010.