As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.
I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.
I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.
As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.
I was having a discussion closely related to this recently because of my background in philosophy of language. Languages are function, but not rigid. The rules and referents of "blue" become kind of pointless around the edges, and narrow words like cyan or turquoise are more functional. This is exaggerated further when the functionality becomes very important, which is where technical jargon starts to come into play. Languages should useful to the speaker; they do not define the constraints of the speaker. "Blue" is useful for the average English speaker, but completely useless for a graphic designer.
The other week my wife and I were disagreeing over whether a house was green or blue. I was shocked when every passerby we asked agreed with her that it was green. I was absolutely 100% sure it was blue. Turns out according to this site, my boundary is greener than 95% of the population! Funny to see this proved out here!
Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen.
I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?
In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
Blue his house
With a blue little window
And a blue Corvette
And everything is blue for him
And himself and everybody around
'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen (to listen)
...I get different numbers depending on which eye I use, but both are fairly center. I didn't expect blue-green to be affected though! My left eye can't see certain shades of red as well as my right eye. Bright sunlight makes it more noticeable, but my own skin looks weirdly (sickly) yellowish with one eye and normal with the other.
Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)
...I never found another person with the same experience. Here we are. For me though, it's not that sunlight makes it more noticeable, it's that I will see the same shades until I've had too much sunlight—eventually my left eye gets tired, I guess, and sees a lot less red than my right eye. After sleeping it resets and I see the same shade in both eyes.
Maybe i should talk to a researcher about this..
I had the same discussion with the color of a river in Albania with my wife. The test says my boundary is a bluer than 85% of the pop - sounds about right!
I have this with a coat, but it's blue vs gray. Would be interesting to generalize this tool not just for other colours, but for other colour properties like saturation not just hue.
> Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
For some people "pink" does not exist as a concept, it is "light red". In English we talk about "light blue", but an Italian may talk about azzurro (galazio (γαλάζιο) in Greek; kachol (כחול) in Hebrew). Is azzurro its own colour different from "blue" for everyone, or only for Italians? Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
Before the different word of "turquoise" was created, did the colour still exist and/or be perceived?
Agree, this seemed silly. It seems to be more a question of "would you say turquise is blue or green?" Rather than a question of our blues match. Better imo would be to ask something like paired colours and pick the "more blue" one. Cool idea for a website, but imo poorly formulated.
But turquoise can be a blue, just because we have a specific word, doesn't mean more general words are invalieated or made as specific.
For example, things can be small or big, a mouse is small, if you refine the vocabulary to include 10 size words, and the mouse is now minuscule, it is still small.
I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
But that is wrong. This doesn't test colour perception, it tests verbal classification of colour perception into a forced binary. Everyone could be perceiving the colour qualia 100% identically, but simply choosing different linguistic cutpoints, meaning you can't say this is about vision / perception at all (it may just be about language use).
OP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.
It should probably alternate between blue/notblue... green/notgreen. I hit the same wall. Second question asked if blue/green when it was neither... and I really mean neither. I don't see cyan as a shade of blue or green, rather much like I don't see green as a shade of blue or yellow.
Huh. I consider cyan to be blue, but it turns out it's made by mixing equal parts of blue and green light on an RGB display.
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
But reproducibility should be the point. As a result of the structure it approaches an asymptote from one side or the other. I took it once and approached from green and my greenness was 77%, a second time it approached from blue and my blueness was 68%.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
It's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
But the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.
I see it as having a blue component and a green component. If the mixture has more green than blue, then it's green.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
but when does turquoise start and end and green starts and blue ends? or is there just another color there between them. And then what about that color?
I think you're (accidentally?) hitting on exactly the point there.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
I totally agree with you but it defeats the purpose of the site. It got to an obviously cyan color and I couldn't answer either way (it's not blue or green) so I closed it.
I closed it also. What's going to happen is all the people who care about the ambiguousness leave, so the resulting population is a bad sample even of the people who open the site in the first place.
In linguistics this sort of thinking comes from 'basic color term' theory, which lays out heuristics for deciding if a word for a color in a given language is 'basic'. 2 things going against these blue-green terms are:
* They refer to specific objects (a duck and a stone), eventually these referents can be transcended though, like with the case of orange.
* Their frequency is roughly similar to each other (along with cyan, aqua, etc.), so there's no one term for this range (e.g. there's no doubt in a corpus of English that red is the basic color term for its spectrum).
I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.
(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
My boundary was hue 188, bluer than 98% of the population, for me turquoise is green and then it shows an overall chart which I have to agree with so no, I don't agree with your assessment. I often get into blue/green arguments with my children and that's when I started to suspect that it was personal opinion.
I never understood "forced classification" games like this (as an aside, it's also why I always hated Myers Briggs). Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but it always seems like a dumb, false choice to me.
For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is literally defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.
But what about the definition of aqua outside of any digital color space?
I feel like using only RGB values to define 'aqua' is a bit reductive as it is merely a specification in a specific environment trying to render a type of color but with inherent limitations such as not being able to reproduce the whole spectrum, color accuracy on the display, etc. etc. there's a lot of other parameters along with your own individual color perception that goes beyond "it's equal values blue and green within the RGB color-space"
But then as I list all these things I think I arrive at the same conclusion as you, it feels like a dumb false choice haha
It's ok that there are things you don't understand in the world. It's just as valid for them to exist, as it is you are upset about it.
Even if aqua is neither more green or more blue, wouldn't it be interesting if when given the choice, the outcome leans toward green or blue to a statistically significant degree? or perhaps that there are differences in how it's perceived based on measurable factors like geography, wealth, height, weight, etc?
Collecting data is how we learn, and discover new things. Even if it seems dumb to you.
I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.
The scenario you're describing seems like more of a language thing than a perception thing. We generally learn names of colors by references to common objects. I would argue that if people agree something is "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple" then it doesn't really matter what you're seeing, that color is red.
I vividly remember my friend and I first thinking of this question during a sleepover at around 13 years old, as we stayed awake late talking about what seemed at the time like the deep philosophies of life. This isn't to say that it's a bad question, but more that it's funny how everyone seems to come up with this question independently at some point. I've read many others with the same question since.
Yup, always wondered this as well! The word for each internal subjective experience is called qualia.
Pretty much impossible to prove the original question until we're able to see through someone else's eyes and brain (if we ever get there, that's probably the least of our philosophical worries :D)
We know for a fact that bees or dogs perceive color very differently. But in between humans, the perception of physical sensations can still be resolved when we consider near-identical genetics.
But it's way more fun when you apply it to abstract concepts like love, happiness, or fear!
"Wittgenstein's beetle" is the mind-blowing concept for today if you want to dive deeper into this rabbit hole :)
I have thought about this many times. The same could be asked about other senses as well like taste, do we both interpret the taste of a banana the same?
At the end of the day what exactly are our senses? Are they simply our brains interpretation of the energies that surround us?
Apparently about 4.4% of the population experiences chromesthesia in which they have a blending of their senses and will see colors or shapes when hearing music.
My opinion is that it is impossible to know and if I had to bet I would bet that we all experience things slightly different. That is only based on the thought that from an evolutionary standpoint we already have many diverse traits from one another. It's another one of those philosophical thoughts we most likely could never answer.
"Alice is in Denver. Is Alice in (a) Canada or (b) Mexico?"
- Your boundary between Canada and Mexico is at 40° latitude, more southern than 53% of the population.
Your example would only be valid if "blue" and "green" had objective answers for when something is Blue and something is Green and have clear demarcated boundaries. You're switching to a literal boundary example where there are actual lines to be crossed. Colors are a fuzzy continuum; national boundaries, not including fought-over areas like the Sea of Japan, are easy to be in or not.
You are confusing geographical position with countries.
Countries are not a continuum, they start and end at some specific line defined by constitutions, mutually agreed by neighbours (or disputed through war and diplomacy)
Colours have no such incentive for strict unified definitions, so there is no point at which blue ends.
I don't like this because many of these transition colors I don't really consider blue or green but some sort of blue-green or green-blue.
I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.
72 green though where it drew me on the gradient at the end I definitely would say the line is on green. and the swatch that is says I think would be blue was, well turquoise and not "blue".
my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess
crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.
I've got a color question that I need some opinions on:
When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.
If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.
My question is:
- I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there?
- If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?
The boundary regions at 3:00, 7:00, and 11:00 are composite colors that have ~2x the brightness compared to the primary colors of red, green, and blue. For someone without a color vision deficiency, they appear brighter than surrounding colors, but the saturation really only varies with distance from the center. For example, to me, the point at 3:00 on the edge of the circle is the peak of a "ridge" in brightness, but appears as a very saturated teal.
I have a colorblindness simulator on my computer called Sim Daltonism and when I use that on the color wheel, it does indeed appear to have white, desaturated lines radiating from the center at those three angles. In the simulator, the one at 11:00 is the strongest, followed by 3:00, and the 7:00 one is faintest. My hunch is that the perceptually uniform color space samples you're looking at have more uniform brightness, so those boundaries blend in to the surrounding colors better. They look nicer to me too -- they still represent saturated, composite colors like teal, but just at a pleasant, harmonious brightness. It's very interesting to compare perception!
Don’t use hsv color wheel to intuit color space. CIE x,y $year_standard is superior to view color space and understand the tricolor values Z = f(X,Y) in every way.
I’m not color blind and see a white barrier between 3 sections(it looks like a 3 piece pie) with lines at the green/blue red/blue and green/yellow boundaries.
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
I always wanted to have a color calibrator and a few years back i bought one.
all my displays were so well defined out of the box, it wasnot worth it at all. Like you would need to use this particular profile for proper real industry printers to even have any benefit of it if even because all my displays were well calibrated.
I would argue that this would only make sense for highly profesional graphics designer and i don't think this experiment requires this level of granularity.
A lot of the color calibration obsession was from back when panels shipped with truly awful factory calibration. A quick perusal of rtings suggests that most manufacturers try and pre-calibrate their panels these days
There's a big cultural component to it, and many languages don't even distinguish blue and green! Also many languages only distinguish them surprisingly recently --- for example, Chinese and Japanese used to use the word 青 which can refer to both blue and green, and even now, the color of the sky in the Republic of China (Taiwanese) flag is referred to by that character.
Same applies for grey, and many other colours and things. For Indonesian culture, grey is the colour of an overcast/hazy/dusty/ash/pale day, as such, it includes any desaturated colour, especially (most commonly) light blues; so for them two blue banknotes, one saturated and one desaturated are clearly different colours and they are perplexed as to why westerners mix them up. More research of this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms>. From my research, a lot of this comes from whether a culture's consideration of a colour is from natural phenomena, or from colour theory (mixing the primary colours to generate the secondary colours, developing color wheels, acquiring distinctions for hue, saturation, lightness, etc). Take "orange" in English, or "cokelat" (the colour brown, and chocolate) and "oranye" (to describe the colour of a ripe orange/"jeruk manis") in Indonesia. Sometimes with cross-cultural intermixing, an object could be named after a colour in one culture, then that object is injected into another culture, and that culture then names the colour after that object. Such cultural introductions also extends to mythology and affect, lighter shades could be considered young or easy (as is "muda" in Indonesian), white could be considered for pure or wealthy or sickly or light, dark for ground/earth or peasant or tanned/healthy, red for blood/danger or passion or love; blue-green for nausea or life/vitality/fertility; same also applies for gender and pronouns; man as in mankind, or man as in male, and their inter-cultural/educational corruption/degradations/influences/experiential-biases/subjectivity.
Asinine and meaningless. Forces a classification on something that obviously anyone with fully-functioning colour vision will classify as "aquamarine" or "turquoise" or etc.
This has nothing at all to do with colour perception, or, if actual differences in perception are involved, this test fails to distinguish those from individual differences in assignment to linguistic categories.
Yeah, as I was toggling "blue" / "green" / "blue" / "green" I had the distinct sensation that it might just show me that I was in a region where I couldn't even make a consistent distinction.
Interesting.
Looking at each in isolation, my boundary is pretty far into Green territory. But when I look at the gradient, I would place it far closer to the center.
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see blue.
Practical ramifications:
* Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny
* Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
One thing that I find interesting when thinking about colour perception, is that even if two people agree that a given colour is red, there is no way to know (as far as I am aware) that they actually perceive it in the same way. Maybe the brain of one person paints it red, and another paints it differently, and there is no way to know as we can't get into other people's heads.
That’s assuming that there is something like a “true” internal color that external colors are mapped onto. I think it’s more likely that for the brain, “red” is just “that hue signal range that red things have”. Which is roughly the same for everyone (modulo color blindness), in the sense that if one person sees two objects as red, another person will also see them as the same color, and will perceive the same brightness and hue relation relative to other objects with adjacent brightness and/or hue.
Meaning, there is no absolute color, the brain just learns what things have the same color, and how similar or dissimilar they are in hue to other objects. And for example “cold” colors are cold because we associate them with cold things, not because of some independent “qualia”.
If I'm looking at a certain color of green illumination and then cover one eye then the other, my perception of that color shifts slightly. It's still green, but with one eye it is "brighter" than the other eye.
Just last week I called something blue and my daughter objected; she said it was green. After discussion we both agreed it was was teal and she said roughly "but teal is a shade of green." To me Teal is a (admittedly greenish) shade of blue.
Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?
No. I got it set for distance vision. There are modern implants that are "multi-focal". But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance. My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now. Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal. 2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
While neat, I don't get consistent scores if I retry it a few times. If it leads with a series of greens first, my score is more green oriented, and vice versa.
Noticing on my monitor that it's more blue if I tiptoe and look down, and it's obviously green when looking at below.
I think a better way to standardize this without too much variance in color would be make the user denote on the screen where they are actually looking perpendicular to the screen and judge from that area.
I wouldn't call most of those colors green or blue. Most of them looked identical to me as well. I ended up picking arbitrarily for all but the two I thought were distinctly one or the other.
I don't find this compelling as it seems to me it's well acknowledged there are colors that are BOTH. As in there are colors widely considered to be blue-green. Blue and Green.
Same. There were like three different colors at first and then the remainder looked mostly the same.
Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.
I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.
I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.
Thanks to the TMS9918, I know cyan when I see it! Years of seeing cyan on a composite monitor where hue is tricky to adjust. My tolerance for the amount of green allowed in cyan is higher. And if it's cyan, it's blue. I see I classified quite a few greenish as cyan therefore blue.
It seems to me there is a broad range of "normal", as in well within the standard spec sheet tolerances for humans. It is more about what is average or median.
I have my doubts about the value of a two-alternative forced choice task for this. I was pretty much answering randomly both of the time because I wouldn't ncessarily have called either green or blue.
I feel like there needs to be some sort of intermediate black screen between the questions, a visual "palette cleanser" if you will. I was actively noticing the saturation of the color decline as I stared at the screen.
This is awesome! I have a slight case of tritanopia in one eye and it was neat to see the difference. My boundary is bluer by 59% in one eye and 87% in the other. It tracks with what I would have expected.
Interesting, I got a completely different result on green/blue on this one, way more green whereas I got average on the individual test. Going between very different colors makes it hard to reset - they might consider breaks between spectra.
This only checks a single brightness level per hue. I bet that two people who agree for those levels might very well disagree at other levels, and vice versa.
I was always fascinated by this kind of question as a kid. Like I would imagine that everyone had all the colors mixed up and we were each seeing something different.
The "exact 50%", or the boundary between green and blue, is nominally hue 180, which is cyan. A search for the RGB, CMYK and HSL for turquoise yielded a few hue values from 171 to 174 (depending who you trust, and allowing for a bit of drift due to colorspace conversions). In any case, 171, 172, 173, and 174 are all on the green side of cyan.
Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?
The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.
It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.
It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.
When the final threshold image was displayed, I felt that the boundary was too far over to the left and I had a fair amount of green on the blue side.
I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.
This assumes that the person you're testing isn't aware of the whole category of colors that sit between green and blue?
There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.
it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa.
EDIT:
in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue
I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.
I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.
As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.
Also, lots of kids don't even go to preschool.
Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen.
I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
For this, you just lost The Game.
If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.
Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)
For some people "pink" does not exist as a concept, it is "light red". In English we talk about "light blue", but an Italian may talk about azzurro (galazio (γαλάζιο) in Greek; kachol (כחול) in Hebrew). Is azzurro its own colour different from "blue" for everyone, or only for Italians? Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
Before the different word of "turquoise" was created, did the colour still exist and/or be perceived?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turquoise#Names
If a language/culture does not have a word for "blue" does that mean the colour does not exist?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...
Where does "white" end and "grey" begin? Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_white
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_gray
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_black
Also, a bit of fun with brown:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU
For example, things can be small or big, a mouse is small, if you refine the vocabulary to include 10 size words, and the mouse is now minuscule, it is still small.
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
* They refer to specific objects (a duck and a stone), eventually these referents can be transcended though, like with the case of orange. * Their frequency is roughly similar to each other (along with cyan, aqua, etc.), so there's no one term for this range (e.g. there's no doubt in a corpus of English that red is the basic color term for its spectrum).
:/
(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
For some, it might be blue -> blue -> blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue.
For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is literally defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.
I feel like using only RGB values to define 'aqua' is a bit reductive as it is merely a specification in a specific environment trying to render a type of color but with inherent limitations such as not being able to reproduce the whole spectrum, color accuracy on the display, etc. etc. there's a lot of other parameters along with your own individual color perception that goes beyond "it's equal values blue and green within the RGB color-space"
But then as I list all these things I think I arrive at the same conclusion as you, it feels like a dumb false choice haha
Even if aqua is neither more green or more blue, wouldn't it be interesting if when given the choice, the outcome leans toward green or blue to a statistically significant degree? or perhaps that there are differences in how it's perceived based on measurable factors like geography, wealth, height, weight, etc?
Collecting data is how we learn, and discover new things. Even if it seems dumb to you.
Pretty much impossible to prove the original question until we're able to see through someone else's eyes and brain (if we ever get there, that's probably the least of our philosophical worries :D)
But it's way more fun when you apply it to abstract concepts like love, happiness, or fear!
"Wittgenstein's beetle" is the mind-blowing concept for today if you want to dive deeper into this rabbit hole :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Note: I'm not sure this is formulated well, or even if I am able to articulate this correctly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
At the end of the day what exactly are our senses? Are they simply our brains interpretation of the energies that surround us?
Apparently about 4.4% of the population experiences chromesthesia in which they have a blending of their senses and will see colors or shapes when hearing music.
My opinion is that it is impossible to know and if I had to bet I would bet that we all experience things slightly different. That is only based on the thought that from an evolutionary standpoint we already have many diverse traits from one another. It's another one of those philosophical thoughts we most likely could never answer.
Rather than asking "Is this blue or green?", it's "Does this look more blue to you, or more green to you?"
Because then your analogy becomes "Is Alice closer to Canada or Mexico?"
Denver is teal, the USA blue-green. Canada is Blue, and Mexico is green.
Their analogy is pretty on point.
Countries are not a continuum, they start and end at some specific line defined by constitutions, mutually agreed by neighbours (or disputed through war and diplomacy) Colours have no such incentive for strict unified definitions, so there is no point at which blue ends.
You're inability to wrap your head around the analogy is tantamount to.. Not being able to comprehend blue-green.
ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.
I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.
Seem to get ~172.
A better interface would have been to just show the final spectrum pic and slide to where you think the separation is.
my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess
crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.
When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.
If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.
My question is: - I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there? - If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62531754/how-to-draw-a-h...
I have a colorblindness simulator on my computer called Sim Daltonism and when I use that on the color wheel, it does indeed appear to have white, desaturated lines radiating from the center at those three angles. In the simulator, the one at 11:00 is the strongest, followed by 3:00, and the 7:00 one is faintest. My hunch is that the perceptually uniform color space samples you're looking at have more uniform brightness, so those boundaries blend in to the surrounding colors better. They look nicer to me too -- they still represent saturated, composite colors like teal, but just at a pleasant, harmonious brightness. It's very interesting to compare perception!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
I think the bands you’re referring to are an artifact.
No idea why
Well... uhm, you may want to verify that claim.
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...
I think the intent here is clear in context.
all my displays were so well defined out of the box, it wasnot worth it at all. Like you would need to use this particular profile for proper real industry printers to even have any benefit of it if even because all my displays were well calibrated.
I would argue that this would only make sense for highly profesional graphics designer and i don't think this experiment requires this level of granularity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Sky_with_a_White_Sun
I like to think this may have had something to do with them having both blue and green in their political usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_blue
This has nothing at all to do with colour perception, or, if actual differences in perception are involved, this test fails to distinguish those from individual differences in assignment to linguistic categories.
It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
Pretty sure I accidentally picked blue for a green once.
Do they see everything beyond the initial green as a shade of blue?
--Edit--
My red/green colorblind father just got back me with this result:
> Your boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 68% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
Meaning, there is no absolute color, the brain just learns what things have the same color, and how similar or dissimilar they are in hue to other objects. And for example “cold” colors are cold because we associate them with cold things, not because of some independent “qualia”.
If I'm looking at a certain color of green illumination and then cover one eye then the other, my perception of that color shifts slightly. It's still green, but with one eye it is "brighter" than the other eye.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
I think a better way to standardize this without too much variance in color would be make the user denote on the screen where they are actually looking perpendicular to the screen and judge from that area.
Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/
Is My Blue Your Blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258 - Sept 2024 (527 comments)
But with both eyes I got
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
I should test with one eye.
Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.
I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.
I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.
Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?
Not much sense for the evolutionary machinery to keep the whole backend the same, but diverge in the perception part.
very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal
Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.
I want to say that shifted my score a lot. But every time I play I get a pretty different score, even on the same screen calibration. So, uh...
isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?
The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.
It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.
It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.
I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.
There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.
EDIT: in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue