Language affects how we see the world. More than that, language affects what we see, even what we can see. If there is no word in the language for it, we’re less likely to see it.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used twenty hues of blue to test for this perceptual quirk. They recruited fifty people, half native English speakers and half native Russian speakers, and had them try to match colored squares. They were shown a reference square of a particular shade of blue and asked which of two other squares, of slightly different shades, matched it. In one type of test the two squares were very similar, and in the other type of test they were more different. Continue reading
