How Important is Color?

by kevin chan

How important is color? We probably take color for granted but we have never really asked such a question. Furthermore, do we need color to be able to recognize scenes in our environment? How important is color to that extent? Some cognitive neuropsychologist tried to answer these questions.

To start off, colour to a very powerful extend enriches the visual experience of a person.

But more importantly, the researches acknowledge that color plays an important role in "pattern detection and object recognition". Top down processing is involved for the knowledge of object color will help us recognize objects better along with "luminance, boundaries, shading, texture and contours".

In general, what do you think is the answer to the ques

tion, "how important is color"? Probably commonsensical psychology would tell us, yo

u need coor period. But is it this so? Studies show that appropriate colour facilitates finding the correct name of an object in memory but these objects must be high in colour diagnosticity. Furthermore, their literature concluded that facilitation occurs at a higher level of visual analysis where, again, knowledge of object properties is stored.

I found it essential that the researchers gave a short case study on a patient with color agnosia

, M.A.H.. Just a short paragraph on him. M.A.H. is a 44-year-old male who had an infarct in the right cerebellar hemisphere, which was confirmed with a MRI scan. 2 years later, neuropsycological that included cognitive domains such as reasoning, language, visual perception, construction, verbal memory, visual memory and executive functioning were all above average for his age. Unfortunately, he did not to so well in the Token Test, Ishihara tes

t and Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue test showed that he was impaired in categorizing and naming colours on the basis of hue.

My only critique is that they could have gotten more participants. I can recall the critique on Freudian psychology is that Freud would have a patient, know its symptoms then deduce that is is applicable for the entire populace. This could be true. We cannot really imply sound conclusions if there is only one patient with color agnosia, M.A.H. The researchers could have looked for more patients or postpone their study altogether.

Now we go to the methodology, 17 participants, included 16 control participants and M.A.H. were showed either natural scenes or non-natural scenes. Natural scenes were either coast, forest and desert while the non-natural scenes were room, city and market. The pictures were digitally edited into these color formats: normally colored, inverted colour, greyscale, inverted greyscale, black and white and spatially rotated images.The participants were then showed each image then were tasked to tell which color format it belonged to. Reaction time it took for t

he participants is what was measured here.

Results showed that MAH took much slower on the natural than on the non natural scenes.

There was infect no different between the control group and MAH on the non natural scene. This implies the very title of the study that "color agnosia impairs the recognition of natural but not of non-natural scenes."

For me this is sad because the most beautiful things in this word are of natural scenes. And if you are color agnostic, you are impaired at looking for example of a sunset. But yo are not impaired recognizing a marketplace. Come to think of it, nonnatural scenes are more of for survival. One needs to see his his house (for shelter), a market place (for buying food) the bathroom (for that physiological need). So to a certain extent, recognizing the non-natural scene is not as visually pleasing but is more essential.