Washington : A new study has suggested that we have trouble remembering specific shades because our brains tend to store what we’ve seen as one of just a few basic hues, says ANI.
Johns Hopkins University-led team demonstrated for the first time that people’s memories for colour are biased in favour of “best” versions of basic colours over the colours they actually saw.
For example, there’s azure, there’s navy, there’s cobalt and ultramarine. The human brain is sensitive to the differences between these hues —we can, after all, tell them apart, but when storing them in memory, people label all of these various colours as “blue,” the researchers found.
The same thing goes for shades of green, pink, purple, etc. This is why, Flombaum said, someone would have trouble glancing at the colour of his living room and then trying to match it at the paint store.
Study leader Jonathan Flombaum said that trying to pick out a colour for touch-ups, he’d end up making a mistake because he’d misremember his wall as more prototypically blue. It could be a green as far as Sherwin-Williams is concerned, but he remembers it as blue.
The findings have broad implications for the understanding of visual working memory.
When faced with a multitude of something, colours, birds, faces, people tend to remember them later as more prototypical, Flombaum said.
