![]() Many languages, including that of the Himba of Namibia, stop at five: light, dark, red, yellow, and green/blue (a sweeping category often called grue). More color-complex languages add a term for red then for yellow or green (first one alone, and then both categories) and then a distinct blue. Their resulting World Color Survey concluded that all the surveyed cultures have a word for black (or dark/cool) and white (or light/warm). Over the years, they extended that into a 2009 monograph, collating information from missionaries working in 110 languages. In 1969, two anthropologists published a summary of the basic color terms used in languages around the world. These are usually-but not always-words that have no other meaning, are short and simple, and are frequently used and agreed upon. Neuroscientist Bevil Conway, who studies vision at the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC, said that for his 10-year-old twins, the blockbuster movie Frozen has made turquoise “super important.”Īnd ideas about color differ dramatically from place to place: some cultures have evolved with surprisingly few color words, while others draw the line between basic colors in surprising places.Ī language may have hundreds of color words (like crimson, vermillion, scarlet, and maroon), but there’s usually broad cultural agreement on a smaller set of basic colors (like red). Few people today would consider “indigo” a basic color, added Eskew. The word “orange” didn’t arrive in the English language until the fruit was imported, and its use for color first appeared in the 1500s. Many ideas about color have changed over time. He chose seven colors in part because the number seven was auspicious: there were seven musical notes in the major scale, and this had long been thought to be meaningful. The concept of a seven-color rainbow dates to Sir Isaac Newton, the seventeenth-century English mathematician most famous for his theory of gravity. Yet there are no lines in a real rainbow: it’s an uninterrupted stream of different wavelengths of light. That’s what vision scientist Rhea Eskew from Northeastern University in Boston remembers teaching his own kids. Many people in the modern Western world would say that there are seven colors in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet (often remembered as ROYGBIV). Ask an adult, by contrast, and you’ll get answers colored by the experiences that have shaped, re-formed, and re-wired our circuits. Peer into a baby’s brain, and you should be able to see whatever basic bits of perception are hardwired in. But there is broad consensus that babies are one of the best windows into the brain as it exists before it gets modified by years of culture, language, and experience-some would say they’re our only window. Not everyone agrees with Skelton’s conclusion that babies have five pots of color. There’s plenty of room for fuzziness and difference all along the way. It turns out that the colors we humans see, think, and talk about are shaped by a huge range of things: the wavelength of the light reaching our eyes the receptors designed to detect this light our brain’s interpretation our cultural understanding of the result and the language we use to talk about it. To understand why Skelton was surprised, and why anyone would do this work in the first place, we need to think a bit more deeply about color. They had five : red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. But the number, she says, was a surprise. As she expected, she found that they did indeed categorize color into a small set of discrete pots. ![]() Skelton ran tests across the full range of the color spectrum with hundreds of four- to six-month-old babies. Do babies think that all kinds of blue belong together in one pot, or do they see cyan and navy as radically different beasts? Do babies draw a line between green and blue the same way many adults do? And how many pots of distinct color are there in a baby’s brain? What Skelton was investigating was color. This strategy can be used to see if and how babies categorize things before they have words for them. Throw in a dog, and their attention is piqued again: they’ll spend more time looking at the novel picture. “They get used to it, and they look less and less,” explained Skelton, who works at the University of Sussex. Show babies a series of pictures of cats, for example, and they will start to lose interest as more and more cats are presented. Her work is based on the basic principle that a baby will pay less attention to something familiar and more attention to something new. “Sometimes they fall asleep,” she laughed, “then you have to throw the data away.” Babies are an extremely cute but also frustrating study set. Psychologist Alice Skelton has spent a lot of time with babies, plopping them down in front of computer screens to try to understand how they perceive the world. ![]()
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