Words help deterimine what we see, but asymmetrically

[anhinga_anhinga]

"The paper suggests that language affects perception in the right half of the visual field, but much less, if at all, in the left half."

quoting from http://cognews.com/1139328519:

The paper suggests that language affects perception in the right half of the visual field, but much less, if at all, in the left half.

...

Many of the distinctions made in English do not appear in other languages, and vice versa. For instance, English uses two different words for the colors blue and green, while many other languages – such as Tarahumara, an indigenous language of Mexico – instead use a single color term that covers shades of both blue and green. An earlier study by Paul Kay and colleagues had shown that speakers of English and Tarahumara perceive colors differently: English speakers found blues and greens to be more distinct from each other than speakers of Tarahumara did, as if the English "green" / "blue" linguistic distinction sharpened the perceptual difference between the colors themselves. The present study essentially repeated the English part of that earlier test, but also made sure that colors were presented to either the right or the left half of the visual field – something the earlier study hadn't done – so as to test whether language influences the right half of our visual world more than the left half, as predicted by brain organization.

In each experimental trial of the present study, participants saw a ring of colored squares. All the squares were of exactly the same color, except for an "odd-man-out" of a different color. The odd-man-out appeared in either the right or the left half of the circle, and participants were asked to indicate which side of the circle the odd-man-out was on, by making a keyboard response. Critically, the color of this odd-man-out had either the same name as the other squares (e.g. a shade of "green", while the others were all a different shade of "green"), or a different name (e.g. a shade of "blue", while the others were all a shade of "green"). The researchers found that participants responded more quickly when the color of the odd-man-out had a different name than the color of the other squares – as if the linguistic difference had heightened the perceptual difference – but this only occurred if the odd-man-out was in the right half of the visual field, and not when it was in the left half. This was the predicted pattern.

The paper itself: "Whorf Hypothesis is Supported in the Right Visual Field but not the Left," by Aubrey Gilbert, Terry Regier, Paul Kay, and Richard Ivry:

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/LeftBrainWhorf.pdf

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all this assuming there are no methodological errors in this study...

via dmierkin

Comments

[cema.livejournal.com]

Sounds plausible.

[spamsink.livejournal.com]

There should have been another control - when the odd man out is of an intermediate color with no well-known name for the participants that have the blue-green distinction, e.g. something like teal or turquoise. In this case I'd predict that the blue-green distinction would be a disadvantage.

[misha-b.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. I know the second author it turns out :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_rowan_tree_/]

Yes, and in (american) English there is no distinction between light blue (голубой) and blue (синий), and the rainbow has 6 colors. I am sure that the same experiment will work as a comparison between Russian speakers and American english speakers. In fact, I noticed that when I am thinking in English, I distinguish these two colors less than in Russian.

Language determines the way we think. Most people's first concious childhood memories coincide with the time they learned to talk. If we have no way of describing something, in a way it doesn't exist.

[anchan-uk.livejournal.com]

Я слышала другой вариант, правда не в научной, а в научно-популярной литетуре. Что человек начал видеть синий цвет сравнительно недавно, и поэтому в старых языках, в частности в санскрите и японском, для обозначения сине-зеленого и синего используется одно слово. Хотя в японском есть специальное выделение зеленого-травяного "midori", синий и сине-зеленый обозначаются одним словом "aoi". Если действительно восприятием сине-зеленого ведают участки мозга, филогенетически более древние, чем восприятием чисто синего, то их обьяснение может быть неверным. По хорошему надо бы повторить упражнение, взяв другую пару цветов где-нибудь в середине спектра, либо уже упоминавшуюся выше пару синий-голубой...