Colour Constancy
The perceptual effect by which an object keeps its apparent colour across widely different illuminants.
In depth
Constancy is the outcome that chromatic adaptation and higher-level scene interpretation together produce: a banana looks yellow indoors and out, at dawn and at noon. Automatic white balance is an attempt to reproduce this computationally, and its failures are usually failures of scene interpretation rather than of measurement.
Examples in practice
A white sheet of paper is recognised as white in candlelight, even though it is physically reflecting deep orange light.