Babies See Pure Color, but Adults Peer Through Prism of Language
Wired’s comically wrong on this one. They claim:
When infant eyes absorb a world of virgin visions, colors are processed purely, in a pre-linguistic parts of the brain. As adults, colors are processed in the brain’s language centers, refracted by the concepts we have for them.
And further:
“As an adult, color categorization is influenced by linguistic categories. It differs as the language differs,” said Kay, who is renowned for his studies on the ways that different cultures classify colors. He cited recent research on the ability of Russian speakers to detect shades of blue that English speakers classify as a single color.
I could explain what’s wrong with it, but I think commenter Bob did it well enough:
Why is the “I don’t know” conclusion of this experiment newsworthy? Nothing is proven by the experiment. In fact, the conclusion drawn by Wired’s facrually inaccurate headline - “Babies See Pure Color, but Adults Peer Through Prism of Language” - is not even suggested by the experiment. Lots of stuff is done in the left hemisphere which is unrelated to language. Proximity is not cause-effect. Further the second experiment cited, the Russian experiment does not support the conclusion stated either. Different cultures catorgize colors differently - that doesn’t necessarily imply that language is the key factor.
I understand publishing a nonconclusive experiment in a scientific journal — it’ll help the next researcher down the road. But why does Wired, and its readers, care?
In addition, let me quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s work (1969) on basic color terms did much to raise the quality of empirical work on the linguistic relativity hypothesis. And together with much subsequent work it strongly suggests that the strongest, across-the-board versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis are false when it comes to color language and color cognition. We now know that colors may be a rather special case, however, for although there is nothing in the physics of color that suggests particular segmentations of the spectrum, the opponent-process theory of color vision, now well confirmed, tells us that there are neurophysiological facts about human beings that influence many of the ways in which we perceive colors.
In other words, Wired’s full of crap.
