
Colors in the summer are not the same in winter, a new study has found.
A new study proposes a theory that says humans see colors according to each season. How can this be? Well, apparently, it all depends on what colors we tend to see more of in the summer, as well as in the winter.
A study published in the Current Biology Journal, University of York researchers have uncovered some extremely interesting information about the way humans perceive the world around them. It turns out that colors are not that stable in our vision, and that our eyes easily trick us when it comes to recognizing them.
The fact that prompted the research was that human vision already has a distinct set of colors that it perceives extremely clearly. They are called unique hues are all the only colors in the entire spectrum which can be seen as pure by our eyes. This means that the eyes manage to distinguish even the slightest tint towards another color. These four colors are blue, green, red, and yellow.
Yet, of these four, there is one that is even more unique to the human vision. This color is yellow. Still, what is so special about yellow, you might ask. Well, for starters it’s one of the colors that not all people like, surprisingly, and in modern poetry, dark yellow has been associated with decadence. But no, that’s not what this study has found out.
The thing is, yellow is the only color that has made people completely agree on what it looks like. For the other three, experiments have shown people disagree over what is true blue, true red, or true green. Yet, for yellow, people have shown a surprising level of agreement.
This newest study goes even a bit further than that. The York men picked 67 people, men and women, in the U.K. and subjected them to color tests both in winter and in summer. They had a hunch that no matter how much they agreed with each other over the correct shade of true yellow, the results in the two seasons would be different.
And indeed they were. People were placed in a room in June and January respectively, and were asked to adjust the yellow on a screen via a remote control until they reached the hue of perfect yellow. To the scientists’ surprise (or delight) the men and women decided on a darker, duller yellow for the January test, while picking a yellow with a slightly green tint In the June test.
This confirms the theory that the colors that we see around us influence the tints we associate with different true colors. The results, however medically unimportant, shed new light on how our eyesight functions.
Image source: David Muscroft via telegraph.co.uk