![]() You might have seen this play out in your daily life if you’re an American English speaker. If we care more about warm-colored things, his thinking goes, we’ll probably name more warm colors, and leave cool colors with fewer specific words to describe them. “We go to great trouble to make a name for something,” Conway says, so it’s reasonable to think that we’re more likely to name things we care more about. The division in the new study has led the researchers to suspect that humans are fundamentally more interested in warm-colored things. Conway’s previous research focused on primate vision, which had already clued him in to the fact that warm colors seem to be special: Fruit, for example, has an evolutionary pressure to attract primates so we can spread its seeds, and it is often red, pink, or orange-colored. “That made an incredible amount of sense,” says Bevil Conway, one of the paper’s coauthors and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health’s National Eye Institute. “Communication consists of something I want to tell you and a code we both know.” The warm words are more specific-and more efficient at getting the point across. And that would mean each word for a warm color refers to fewer colors than the cool words. The implication: If you were to take the spectrum of colors that are perceptibly different to humans and chop it in half, every language would have more words for describing the warm half than the cool half. When the researchers ranked the data from all 113 languages, a division between warm and cool colors started to take shape: Listeners selected fewer possible chips when a speaker described a warm-colored one than a cool-colored one. In addition to the three language groups, the researchers used data from the World Color Survey, a publicly accessible collection of results from anthropologists performing similar guessing games among speakers of 110 languages around the world. The number of chips the listener picked out was the study’s proxy for “efficient” communication: The fewer chips that a word corresponds to, the fewer guesses it would take for the listener to ultimately find the right one with just the single color term as a clue. The listener picked out all the chips that could fall into the category described by the term-anything and everything that looks like a yellow, or a pink, or a green, and so on. The researchers gave one participant (the speaker) a randomly selected color chip, then had them describe it to another participant (the listener) using a single color term. ![]() The study, which was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, asked people who speak three different languages-American English, Bolivian Spanish, and an Amazonian language called Tsimane-to play a guessing game. This result has implications for the evolution of color vision in humans and other primates, and even the reason language developed to begin with. When you’re trying to describe a color to someone else, that person will identify the correct one faster if it’s warm rather than cool. But a new study might change that: Across languages, it suggests, warm and cool colors can be distinguished by how easy they are to communicate. Still, the basis for the warm-cool divide has remained murky, largely resting on the sometimes ambiguous and overlapping feelings different colors give people, as opposed to any clear scientific distinction. Interior designers claim that cool colors recede and make rooms expand, while warm colors make rooms cozier. The balance between them is said to enhance the beauty of Baroque landscapes and the Mona Lisa. The internet abounds with techniques for teaching elementary schoolers the difference between warm and cool colors-an often-invisible, somewhat flexible line down the middle of the color wheel to separate warm reds, oranges, yellows, and browns from cool blues, greens, purples, and grays.
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