Blind people cannot see colors, but they can understand colors as well as sighted people!

Senior author Marina Bedny said: “Dating back to Locke’s time, people’s general intuition is that blind people can know that marigolds are'yellow' and tomatoes are the arbitrary fact that they are'red'.

The research results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

In a two-stage experiment, blind and normal-sighted adults were first asked about the common color of objects (random facts), why they were that color, and the likelihood that two randomly selected objects were the same color

Although normal participants do not always agree with the fact that blind people have any color, saying that bananas are yellow, blind people reason about why bananas are yellow and judge how two bananas may be the same color (color consistency) [MB1]) Same as normal people, the research team found

The lead author of the research report, Judy Kim, was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and is now a postdoctoral assistant at Yale University

The color of the polar bear is an illustrative example of this experiment

Next, the research team asked the participants to predict the colors of fictional objects they had never seen or heard of

The research team told participants about the objects found on a remote island, where people have their own language, tools, machines, customs, etc.

Blind people and sighted people made the same judgments about these new objects, which shows that their knowledge of colors is applicable to new examples and does not rely on memory

In a recent related study, the team also found that although blind people have not seen animals such as elephants and lions, they will make decisions based on their understanding of the appearance of animals (for example, mammals living on land have legs).

Bedney next wanted to determine how color knowledge is managed in the brain and work with blind children to try to understand how and when blind and sighted people gain an understanding of color

She said: "We assume this is casual learning through dialogue and reading, but when does this happen?" "Do blind and normal-sighted children learn this information in the same way?" Children with sight are using it.

Journal Reference :

1. Judy Sein Kim, Brianna Aheimer, Verónica Montané Manrara, Marina Bedny.