Memory interferes with distinguishing colors. Free Technical Library News

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Memory makes it difficult to distinguish colors

12.06.2015

Our eye distinguishes many shades of colors: among only blue, we can distinguish azure, and cobalt, and ultramarine, and many more other options. However, in our memory, we still have some kind of “main” color that replaces all shades: azure, cobalt, and ultramarine become just blue.

Jonathan Flombaum from Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues from a number of other American research centers set up the following experiment: volunteers were asked to look at a color wheel with 180 different shades and find among them the "best" blue, "best" green, orange etc. Then for a moment (more precisely, for one tenth of a second) they were shown a colored square, which was replaced by an absolutely white square - at this time it was necessary to revive the color of the first square in memory. Finally, the person had to find that color on the same color wheel.

As psychologists write in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, when trying to indicate the color they saw, all participants in the experiment were mistaken, trying to point to the one that seemed to them the “best” for the first time, that is, the most corresponding to yellow, blue, green, etc. and not the one that actually happened. Moreover, the craving for such a primary color intensified if, after a colored square, it was necessary to remember its color at least for a split second. That is, the more actively the memory worked, the worse the person found the shade that he really saw.

In other words, when we go to the store and take some wallpaper or paint of the same (as it seems to us) shade that we have at home, and then we come and understand that the shade is not at all the same, it’s not the fault so much the seller who convinced us to take not that, but our own memory. The same can happen not only with flowers, but in general with everything that we see: the brain tries to reduce all objects to some basic "prototypes" that have been deposited in it. Of course, when we talk about the best, or basic, or prototypical color, then this has nothing to do with the physics of color - here we are talking about the personal psychological characteristics of the individual. Why this or that object or color suddenly became the main one for him is another question that requires a separate study. It is possible that the clue here lies partly in the language and word usage: if we meet and pronounce the word "blue" more often than the word "azure", this may affect which of the colors our memory will retain.

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