Net of obvious and known differences such as Daltonism, all of them do we see the colors in the same way? A recent study released on Iscience, entitled Is My “Red” Your “Red”? Try to answer this question and make it measurable: when we say red, in our minds the same image for everyone is formed more or less? Obviously it is themposible to enter the heads of others and “see with the eyes of others”, but this study tried to overcome the problem using Couples of colors: the participants had to judge the similarity Of these colors and thanks to these judgments, the researchers created “Maps of perception“To compare. The result? Yes, my red is more or less the same as yours.
How to evaluate subjective experiences such as “seeing a color”?
Imagine watching one red apple. You say it’s red. A friend of yours looks at the same apple and he also says he is red. But how do we know if thesubjective experience What do you have “red” is the same as that of your friend? That is, do you mentally perceive it in the same way? You, or he, could have totally different experiences: maybe you have learned to call “red” that certain color during childhood, because everyone, for conventionso they did. Since then, theexperience of red, that is, what it means for you to see a red object, is a precise thing, but Nobody can enter your head To see or hear Exactly What you feel and perceive: you could see it darker, clearer, tending to the blue or less vivid than someone else. This has led many researchers to consider this question impossible to answer empirically.
However, the philosophy of the mind that invented the term “quaia“To define the qualities of subjective experiences, that is, how we feel when we try something. The”redness“It is one of these quadia (” How do you feel like seeing red? “), But it is difficult, if not impossible, compare it directly with that of someone else, so the researchers of the study wanted to test one indirect measurement of these quado del Rosso.
The experiment to decide if “my red is like yours”
The goal of this study was to understand if thesubjective experience of the colors is the same From person to person. Since it is Unable to compare directly the private experiences of our mind (and this is also one of the limits of this research), the researchers used a indirect approach And innovative: instead of asking “Do you see the red how do I see it?”, They ask: “are the relationships between the colors you perceive are the same that I perceive?“. For example, these colors for you how much do they look like? Little? Very? Are they opposite? And are they for others too?
These relations between colors are called “Quoline structures“, In poor words, structures of individual” mental experiences “. The idea is that, even if we cannot know how your” red “is directly, we can understand if for you” red “and” orange “they are like they are for someone else.
They therefore asked 488 people, with normal and Daltonic vision, to express themselves regarding the degree of similarity of a pair of colors, expressing a vote of similarity. They did the same with a group of Daltonic people, then subsequently create Color experience maps .
Putting together the judgments of similarity, For each color, the researchers estimated “embeddings”, or of the coordinates that locate every judgment on a space. You know when we use latitude and longitude To define precisely a city, or anywhere? The same happens or not with the embeddings, but you have to imagine many more parameters: in the case of latitude and longitude the parameters are two, in this experiment the coordinates for each judgment formulated are 20! Plus two colors they were judged similar by the participants, plus their coordinates they appeared close among them.
To understand if the maps of the judgments of the various participants were similar or different it was enough overlap the maps. If the maps of the judgments of each participant are similar to each other, it is deduced that those same people they perceive similarly the relationships between the different colors.
Result? The maps of people with normal vision were aligned with each other. Those of the Daltonic pure, but the map of a normotypical blind and a Daltonic did not match. This confirms not only that the experience of the colors is different from the normotypical and daltonic blinds, as we could imagine, but also that within the same group The perception of color is similar: in short, within an or same group, red is the same.
