Language can organically absorb information about the visual world and transmit these associations naturally, even in individuals who never directly experienced it.
According to a new study, certain colors evoke specific adjectives and emotions: the Green remembers nature and freshness, while purple, for example suggests royalty and mystery.
Many of these associations originate in Visual Experiences: A red incandescent stove is hot, a layer of blue ice is cold, a green plant is natural, etc.
However, many of these same associations are also created by people Congenital Cegaswhich suggests that these links are closely associated with the language.
To investigate this phenomenon, a team of psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used mathematical and computational tools, including artificial intelligence, to study Incorporations of words (word embeddings).
The incorporations of words are mathematical models that capture how words are Used together in large words of wordssuch as books, news articles and speech transcripts, explains the.
In these models, each word is placed in a kind of virtual spacewhere words that appear in similar contexts are positioned closer to each other.
For example, if “red” and “hot” they often appear in similar types of sentences, The model will put them close to each other In this space.
The study sought not only relations between “obvious” associations and widely known, as if red is hot or cold, but also more obscure connections between Abstract colors and concepts like live-deadfast, new, junky, maid, soft, lightweight, fresh-stressed.
The team then compared the results of their words of incorporation of words with Data collected from real peoplewith both vision and blind.
The results of the, which were presented in an article published in the Communications Psychology, showed that blind and vision do very similar color associationsdespite their very different perceptions and experiences.
This conclusion implies that associations are often learned through second order co-company- Indirect connections between words. That is, color associations probably start from visual experiences, but can be transmitted purely through language.
The study authors suggest that this It doesn’t happen simply Because blind people have been informed that, for example, “red is hot.” On the contrary, these associations are organically incorporated into language.
This conclusion is reinforced by the links made by all people in more unusual associations between colors and abstract themesas happily, calm-zango, submissive, or relaxed.
Liu Q. et al / Communications Psychology
In everyday language, people usually do not establish connections between, for example, yellow and abstract concepts like fast-lentO, but when requested to do so, both individuals with vision and blind tend to do Surprisingly similar associations.
“We have shown that these associations are indeed incorporated into the statistical structure of language,” write the authors of the study in their article.
This is one of many Incredible language skills. Over time, words accumulate layers of cultural and sensory meaning, often shaped by collective experience.
When people describe something like “hot red” or “cold blue”, they are resorting to rooted metaphors in the visionbut these metaphors become so rooted in language that they can be understood-even without input direct sensory.
