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Is one person red the green of another? A new “relational approach” technique is helping to reveal that color is actually a shared phenomenon.
Does everyone feel the color the same way?
A new investigation in Iscian on this philosophical issue provided the strongest evidence that people with typical chromatic view They really share the same subjective experiences of color.
Putting our conscious subjective experiences in words is a notorious challenge, which makes it difficult to directly compare our reality with someone else’s, but researchers have tried several tricks to circumvent this situation.
According to, a technique, known as relational approachit consists of asking people to consider the relationship between concepts – for example, most people consider that red is the opposite of green.
“Our red experience is somewhat characterized by the relationship between other experiences,” says Masafumi Oizumi, researcherfrom the University of Tokyo, in Japan.
who used this approach asked people to classify the similarity of pairs of color and then mapped these color relationslabeling the position of each color.
Comparing these positions – assuming that one person’s red will align with another – provides some information about the WAY WE PERFORE THE COLORbut cannot fully exclude the possibility that one person’s red can be the green of another, says Oizumi.
In an attempt to do so, Oizumi and his colleagues asked the 683 people to classify the similarity of pairs of color extracted from 93 unique shadesvarying slightly in hue, brightness and saturation, using an eight -point scale.
About one third of the participants was colorblindespecially red-red, which allowed the team to compare their experience with that of people with Normal chromatic view.
The team then created a Map of the similarity classifications of each participantbut in a new stage, it did not label the colors on this map.
Using a computer model, the researchers randomly combined the maps of different participants, discovering Relational structures that were not explicitly linked to color.
Nevertheless, the team found that, at the group level, people with typical chromatic vision share the same relative chromatic structure with each other.
Oizumi states that this means that Other Mappingincluding an inverted experience, they are not plausible. More studies are needed to decisively refute the idea of inverted color experiences, says Nao TsuchiyaMember of the Monash University team in Melbourne, Australia, “but we know we are going to that direction.”
The same happened with the Daltonic participantsalthough they have different degrees of green-red color blindness.
The color structures were also very similar in all participants, although the experiences of red and green were much closer to the colorblies, suggesting that they see these colors as more similar than people with typical chromatic vision.
Since the team model works through correspondence based only on the similarity structure and not through the attempt to align predefined labels, the Results are much more robuststates David Bimleran independent researcher who was previously at Massey University in New Zealand.
“It’s a positive result that was not incorporated into things in hiding, ”he concludes.
Teresa Oliveira Campos, Zap //
