Nov 11, 2024 06:17 PM
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/how-we-perceive-color/
EXCERPT: . . . Our sex can also play a role in how we perceive color, as well as our age and even the color of our irises. Our perception can change depending on where we live, when we were born and what season it is.
To learn more about individual differences in color vision, Knowable Magazine spoke with visual neuroscientist Jenny Bosten of the University of Sussex in England, who wrote about the topic in the 2022 Annual Review of Vision Science. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How many colors are there in the rainbow?
Physically, the rainbow is a continuous spectrum. The wavelengths of light vary smoothly between two ends within the visible range. There are no lines, no sharp discontinuities. The human eye can discriminate far more than seven colors within that range. But in our culture, we would say that we see seven color categories in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. That’s historical and cultural.
Is that what you taught your own kids, now aged 10 and 5?
I didn’t teach them anything about color because I was interested in observing what they naturally thought about it. Like, for instance, my daughter, probably at the age of 5, said: “Are we going to the blue building?” To me, it looked white. But it was illuminated by a blue-sky light. There’s also an anecdote that I’ve heard — I don’t know if there’s any solid evidence for this — that children can sometimes initially call the sky white, and then later they learn to perceive it as blue. I was interested in observing all these potential things in my own children.
Surely most people around the world agree in general about the main, basic colors, like red, yellow and blue. Don’t they?
There are several big datasets out there looking at color categorization across cultures. And the consensus is that there are some commonalities. This implies that there might be some biological constraints on the way people learn to categorize color. But not every culture has the same number of categories. So, there’s also this suggestion that color categories are cultural, and cultures experience a kind of evolution in color terms. A language might initially make only two or three distinctions between colors, and then those categories build up in complexity over time.
In some languages, like old Welsh for example, there’s no distinction made between blue and green — they both fall into a kind of “grue” category. In other languages, a distinction is made between two basic color terms for blue: In Russian, it’s siniy for dark blue and goluboy for lighter blue. Do speakers that make that distinction actually perceive colors differently? Or is it just a linguistic thing? I think the jury’s still out on that... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: . . . Our sex can also play a role in how we perceive color, as well as our age and even the color of our irises. Our perception can change depending on where we live, when we were born and what season it is.
To learn more about individual differences in color vision, Knowable Magazine spoke with visual neuroscientist Jenny Bosten of the University of Sussex in England, who wrote about the topic in the 2022 Annual Review of Vision Science. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How many colors are there in the rainbow?
Physically, the rainbow is a continuous spectrum. The wavelengths of light vary smoothly between two ends within the visible range. There are no lines, no sharp discontinuities. The human eye can discriminate far more than seven colors within that range. But in our culture, we would say that we see seven color categories in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. That’s historical and cultural.
Is that what you taught your own kids, now aged 10 and 5?
I didn’t teach them anything about color because I was interested in observing what they naturally thought about it. Like, for instance, my daughter, probably at the age of 5, said: “Are we going to the blue building?” To me, it looked white. But it was illuminated by a blue-sky light. There’s also an anecdote that I’ve heard — I don’t know if there’s any solid evidence for this — that children can sometimes initially call the sky white, and then later they learn to perceive it as blue. I was interested in observing all these potential things in my own children.
Surely most people around the world agree in general about the main, basic colors, like red, yellow and blue. Don’t they?
There are several big datasets out there looking at color categorization across cultures. And the consensus is that there are some commonalities. This implies that there might be some biological constraints on the way people learn to categorize color. But not every culture has the same number of categories. So, there’s also this suggestion that color categories are cultural, and cultures experience a kind of evolution in color terms. A language might initially make only two or three distinctions between colors, and then those categories build up in complexity over time.
In some languages, like old Welsh for example, there’s no distinction made between blue and green — they both fall into a kind of “grue” category. In other languages, a distinction is made between two basic color terms for blue: In Russian, it’s siniy for dark blue and goluboy for lighter blue. Do speakers that make that distinction actually perceive colors differently? Or is it just a linguistic thing? I think the jury’s still out on that... (MORE - missing details)