News
Colour For Blind People
Is colour something experienced only by those with sight? It’s often assumed that those who’re born blind can learn facts about colours — that a banana is yellow, say — but won’t have the same complex understanding of colour that sighted people have.
Now a new research in PNAS from Judy Kim and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University shows that this is not the case. Instead, the researchers find that blind people have a rich understanding of colour developed through language alone.
Some findings of the experiments carried out by the team were consistent with the idea that colour knowledge is acquired through sight. For example, blind people were less likely to agree on associative colour facts; when asked to generate a common colour for a banana, only 50% of blind participants said that bananas were “yellow”, compared to practically all sighted participants. This would suggest that, at least in some cases, directly seeing the colour of an object is more informative than acquiring facts about its colour through other means.
Overall, this study wonderfully illustrates that blind and sighted people share common knowledge about colour. Though the two groups differ in some domains — particularly when it comes to associative knowledge about the colour of objects, they are largely similar in their understanding of the natural occurrence and application of colours. Blind individuals are able to draw upon deep understandings of how colours function, and make inferences about totally new objects based on their category alone, in a way that closely resembles those with sight.
The authors take this data to suggest that those living in the same wider societal culture, sighted or blind, develop similar intuitive theories of colour which can be applied to totally novel situations. The source of this knowledge is almost certain to be linguistic, and future research may determine at what ages this framework for colour knowledge develops in both sighted and congenitally blind individuals.
Now a new research in PNAS from Judy Kim and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University shows that this is not the case. Instead, the researchers find that blind people have a rich understanding of colour developed through language alone.
Some findings of the experiments carried out by the team were consistent with the idea that colour knowledge is acquired through sight. For example, blind people were less likely to agree on associative colour facts; when asked to generate a common colour for a banana, only 50% of blind participants said that bananas were “yellow”, compared to practically all sighted participants. This would suggest that, at least in some cases, directly seeing the colour of an object is more informative than acquiring facts about its colour through other means.
Overall, this study wonderfully illustrates that blind and sighted people share common knowledge about colour. Though the two groups differ in some domains — particularly when it comes to associative knowledge about the colour of objects, they are largely similar in their understanding of the natural occurrence and application of colours. Blind individuals are able to draw upon deep understandings of how colours function, and make inferences about totally new objects based on their category alone, in a way that closely resembles those with sight.
The authors take this data to suggest that those living in the same wider societal culture, sighted or blind, develop similar intuitive theories of colour which can be applied to totally novel situations. The source of this knowledge is almost certain to be linguistic, and future research may determine at what ages this framework for colour knowledge develops in both sighted and congenitally blind individuals.