A photo from open sources
Has this happened to you: come home from the construction store and you find that you bought paint of the wrong color which do you need? Do not blame your forgetfulness. Quite perhaps the reason for this misunderstanding is not at all yours distraction.
As new research has shown, the human brain is able to discern millions of colors however he experiences significant difficulty remembering individual shades.
For example, most people can easily label differences between colors like azure, navy and ultramarine. But when it comes to remembering, people like they tend to simply label them in blue. This trend towards the association of colors, according to researchers, explains why so it is difficult to choose the right shade of paint for the house, relying exclusively in my memory.
According to Jonathan Flombaum, a cognitive psychologist from University of Baltimore, many cultures exist same words for flowers or their categories. But at the same time, There is heated debate about the role of these categories in the perception of colors.
In his study, Flombaum and his colleagues conducted four experiments on four different groups of people. IN the first case, they asked subjects to look at the color wheel with 180 different shades and suggested choosing the best name for each color. Experience was aimed at getting perceptual boundaries. colors. In the second experiment, scientists showed different people same colors, but this time they were asked to find the “best sample” for a specific color.
In the third test, scientists showed participants colored squares. and asked to choose the most suitable shade on the color wheel. In the fourth case, another group of participants did the same task, but the choice of color was carried out after 90 milliseconds.
The results of the study showed that in how people define and remember colors, categories play a leading role. Members who were asked to name the colors, distinctly distinguished five shades: Blue, yellow, pink, purple and green. Also people tended to choose the same shades for the best sample of each colors.
But the most striking thing was how people remembered colors. Researchers suggested that participants answered the question which the colors they saw will be a bell-shaped curve, the center of which denoted the correct color. However, they found that subjects tried to select the “best sample” of color that they seen, and not the color that they actually showed.
The results suggest that the brain remembers colors both as discrete categories and as large a variety of shades, carrying out the process of memorization using combination of these representations.
