Man vs Mind by Daniel Richardson

Author:Daniel Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Russian blues

Now we can go back to colour. Although people across the world can, broadly speaking, see colours equally well, how might the fact that they have five, seven, ten or twenty colour terms change how they think about colour? Boroditsky carried out experiments with Russian and English speakers, and a lot of blue blobs.

Her task was simple. One blob of colour was shown at the top of a screen, and two at the bottom. Participants had to press a button to indicate which of the two blobs at the bottom matched the target at the top. There were many trials, with many different colours, but Boroditsky was interested in two types of trial in particular. In one, the two blobs at the bottom were both the type of blue Russian speakers would call siniy, the deeper, royal blue. One of them was around ten per cent lighter than the other, but they were both siniy, and only one matched the siniy blob at the top. In the second type of trial, there were still two blue blobs differing by about ten per cent, but one was now called goluboy. That ten per cent difference happened to straddle the boundary between the two colours.

If you gave this task to a robot with a light meter, the two trials would be equally difficult. In both, you have to discriminate blues ten per cent apart and match one of them to the target. To an English-speaking human the trials are also equally difficult: they are all just types of blue. However, the Russian speakers were faster at the second trial, when the two blobs were siniy and goluboy, rather than siniy and a slightly lighter siniy. In other words, the presence of a linguistic label gave them a processing boost. And yet, just like the English speakers sorting football pictures, when the Russian speakers recited numbers in their head, the processing boost went away. Thinking of numbers was enough to engage and occupy the language-processing part of the brain so it couldn’t contribute to the colour task, and the Russian speakers matched colour blobs more like the English speakers.

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