Color perception is a subject that's fascinated me for a long time. Humans are visually rather unique, as unlike most other mammals we are able to see beyond yellow into the orange and red spectral range.
That's probably attributable to trichromacy, having three classes of retinal cones. The article points this out and correctly notes the complexity of visual circuitry without giving much detail. That's OK, the layers involved in translating retinal impulses, the exquisitely intricate slicing and dicing visual information into encodings for shape, motion, texture, surface, depth as well as color are truly mind-boggling.
That suggests to me that trying to ascertain linguistic influences on the visual system may be a form of "premature optimization". Of course it will be no surprise to find out there are cultural effects on verbal color description and communication conventions. OTOH it's also plausible to suppose that humans of various cultures can distinguish colors equally well when color naming is not demanded.
Artists who care about color don't care about the names colors are called by. What is important is being able to distinguish subtly different colors in order to be able to produce results. On the web #ff8844 doesn't have to have a name, it does the same thing anyway.
At the end of the day it's important to determine if language really changes what we see, or only the modes of communication, styles, fashions and all the layers piled on top of actual sensory experience.
Perhaps in everyday activity who cares if a shade is "orange" vs. "tangerine". When fine color discrimination really counts, in art, engineering, medicine, color names are secondary if necessary at all.
Want to know something freaky? Violet doesn't contain any red. I'm talking about the deep shade of blue on the rainbow. When your eyes see light with a frequency beyond blue, they start detecting phantom red. Literally, when your blue cones detect that frequency, your red cones also get activated. This effect is replicated in digital cameras, so that the pictures you take with your phone look right.
Actually I haven't heard of any camera where it is replicated.
I used to own a purple backpack that appeared bright blue under every single digital camera I tried, including fancy ones. Combinations of red and blue will appear purple in cameras, but real purples won't.
I did the test but found it entirely un-illuminating. I got '19' where '0' is perfect, but I have no idea where that puts me in the distribution (top 10%? bottom 10%? bang on the median?).
I got a form that said "To see how your results compare to those of others, please provide the information below."
There was not really much more information, but it said 99 is "low".
> At the end of the day it's important to determine if language really changes what we see, or only the modes of communication, styles, fashions and all the layers piled on top of actual sensory experience.
This study seems to show that language plays a role:
"The Himba tribe from northern Namibia, for instance, does not classify green and blue separately, the way Westerners do, but it does differentiate among various shades of what we call green. And when tested, members of the tribe, who are likely to have trouble with blue-green distinctions that most Westerners make easily, readily distinguish among greens that tend to look the same to Western eyes."[0]
Color me skeptical, I have some doubts about that NYT piece. I did take a look, and indeed I had trouble with telling shades of green as presented.
However, the image of color patches was quite blurry, color mottled and totally ambiguous. The RBG explication was interesting, showing three greens, 80/186/15, 80/187/15, 97/192/4. To make sense of it, in a paint program I made patches with these RGB values.
Seeing a difference between 97/192/4 and the others was easy, but telling 80/186/15 vs. 80/187/15 wasn't really possible. I have serious doubts anyone could reliably do so, regardless of ethnic background.
But it's no surprise. Is a typical computer display reliably capable of rendering that small a difference in green representation? Furthermore, in a printed format, how reliably can inks/dyes reproduce such a small color distinction, let alone the variables introduced by ink thickness, paper characteristics and so on.
To my mind, it's not convincing, there are just too many inadequately controlled variables. Determining the "nature vs. nurture" factors implicated in behavior as complex as color perception and discrimination capabilities requires a great deal more study to even know what it is we are studying.
Huh, I checked out the RGB values in the linked Boingboing post[0] too, and didn't notice that one had green 187. I very much doubt that was intentional or what they were testing for. Interesting that you found the larger difference to be easy to spot--I saw the difference but only after looking carefully.
What I found most fascinating was the screenshot in the Boingboing post of the person looking at green squares with one aqua. I suppose they could have a very high incidence of tritanopia, blue light insensitivity, and in fact the spectrum shown here[1] matches up rather nicely with what's in the screenshot. I'd be surprised if this wasn't taken into account, though.
Took the test and got a 0, but strange thing I noticed during the test was that "wiping" the cursor over the colored blocks during the test seemed to increase the saturation of the blocks, making the test much easier.
I noticed I had to spend a lot of time in the bottom two rows near the ends--in the purples, for instance, it was near-impossible for me to tell the last three tiles apart.
That's probably attributable to trichromacy, having three classes of retinal cones. The article points this out and correctly notes the complexity of visual circuitry without giving much detail. That's OK, the layers involved in translating retinal impulses, the exquisitely intricate slicing and dicing visual information into encodings for shape, motion, texture, surface, depth as well as color are truly mind-boggling.
That suggests to me that trying to ascertain linguistic influences on the visual system may be a form of "premature optimization". Of course it will be no surprise to find out there are cultural effects on verbal color description and communication conventions. OTOH it's also plausible to suppose that humans of various cultures can distinguish colors equally well when color naming is not demanded.
Artists who care about color don't care about the names colors are called by. What is important is being able to distinguish subtly different colors in order to be able to produce results. On the web #ff8844 doesn't have to have a name, it does the same thing anyway.
At the end of the day it's important to determine if language really changes what we see, or only the modes of communication, styles, fashions and all the layers piled on top of actual sensory experience.
Perhaps in everyday activity who cares if a shade is "orange" vs. "tangerine". When fine color discrimination really counts, in art, engineering, medicine, color names are secondary if necessary at all.
BTW if anyone wants to informally test their own color discrimination ability, I'd recommend looking here: http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge