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Traffic lights: like bananas or carrots?
When we see a colour that is somewhere between yellow and orange, we call it 'yellow' if it is on a banana, but 'orange' on a carrot. Our memory for what colours things are can help deal with the inherent ambiguity in the world, caused, for instance, by different lighting conditions. MPI researchers recently discovered that verbal labels influence our colour perception. Their results will be published in the November issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Oct 29, 2009
Influences of memory and perception do not arise only in colour perception, but are present in other domains too, such as speech perception. But how does memory influence perception? Is this because we know what bananas and carrots look like, or because we call bananas 'yellow' and carrots 'orange'?
Yellow or orange
This question may seem difficult to answer, but traffic lights in the Netherlands and Germany offer an interesting test case: The colours on traffic lights are in both countries determined by European Norms, but the middle light is called 'gelb' (yellow) in German, but 'oranje' (orange) in Dutch. Therefore, Holger Mitterer and Asifa Majid from the MPI for Psycholinguistics, in collaboration with the RWTH University in Aachen, Germany, tested the perception of colour on traffic lights in Dutch and German participants. The results show that verbal labels influence how we perceive the world: When confronted with the same colours between yellow and orange on a traffic light, German participants were more likely than Dutch participants to call the colours 'yellow'. In other words: It is not what things look like, it is what you call them.
