May 14, 2008
Do Infants See Colors Differently? [Mind Matters]
Scientific American - Posted: May 14th, 2008, 8:00am EDT
How do we perceive a rainbow? And does everyone perceive a rainbow in the same way? These seemingly simple questions can reveal some interesting features of the human brain. For instance, is the “striped” appearance of the rainbow--the seven distinct bands of color that we see--a construct of our higher mental processes, or do the mechanics of human color vision determine it at a very early perceptual level? If your language does not have separate words for “blue” and “green” (and many languages, including Welsh, do not), do you perceive these shades as more similar than a speaker of English? [More]
