Congenitally blind and sighted individuals can understand color similarly, according to the team of cognitive neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins University.
“A common intuition dating back to Locke is that a blind person could learn the arbitrary fact that marigolds are ‘yellow’ and tomatoes are ‘red’ but would still miss out on in-depth understanding of color,” said senior author Marina Bedny.
To know something, we have to see it and without vision, we can only pick shallow facts by talking to people. Whereas a new study suggests this idea is opposite with blind people. Talking to people conveys in-depth understanding of color better than arbitrary color facts.
The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In a two-phase experiment, blind and sighted adults were first asked the common color of objects (the arbitrary facts), why they were that color, and the likelihood that two of those objects selected at random would be the same color.
The objects were a combination of natural things (fruits, plants, gems) and man-made ones (pen, dollar bill, stop sign). Blind participants did not always agree with sighted people about arbitrary color facts.
The team found that blind people’s reasoning and judgments about color are similar to sighted people.The result held across different types of objects, including those that are colored for specific reasons, like stop signs, coins and even wedding dresses.
Blind and sighted individuals also displayed the same depth of understanding in explaining why objects had certain colors, said lead author Judy Kim, a former Johns Hopkins graduate student who is now a postdoctoral associate at Yale University.
Blind and sighted people made identical judgments about these novel objects, showing that their color knowledge generalizes to new examples and is not dependent on memorizing.
The team similarly found that while blind people have not seen animal like elephants and lions, they make informed guesses about their appearance based on an understanding why animals look the way they do.
Researchers will next determine how color knowledge is managed in the brain, and work with blind children to learn how and when blind and sighted people acquire understanding of color.
“A common intuition dating back to Locke is that a blind person could learn the arbitrary fact that marigolds are ‘yellow’ and tomatoes are ‘red’ but would still miss out on in-depth understanding of color,” said senior author Marina Bedny.
To know something, we have to see it and without vision, we can only pick shallow facts by talking to people. Whereas a new study suggests this idea is opposite with blind people. Talking to people conveys in-depth understanding of color better than arbitrary color facts.
The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In a two-phase experiment, blind and sighted adults were first asked the common color of objects (the arbitrary facts), why they were that color, and the likelihood that two of those objects selected at random would be the same color.
The objects were a combination of natural things (fruits, plants, gems) and man-made ones (pen, dollar bill, stop sign). Blind participants did not always agree with sighted people about arbitrary color facts.
The team found that blind people’s reasoning and judgments about color are similar to sighted people.The result held across different types of objects, including those that are colored for specific reasons, like stop signs, coins and even wedding dresses.
Blind and sighted individuals also displayed the same depth of understanding in explaining why objects had certain colors, said lead author Judy Kim, a former Johns Hopkins graduate student who is now a postdoctoral associate at Yale University.
Blind and sighted people made identical judgments about these novel objects, showing that their color knowledge generalizes to new examples and is not dependent on memorizing.
The team similarly found that while blind people have not seen animal like elephants and lions, they make informed guesses about their appearance based on an understanding why animals look the way they do.
Researchers will next determine how color knowledge is managed in the brain, and work with blind children to learn how and when blind and sighted people acquire understanding of color.
‘Blind people can understand color through casual conversation.’
