“What this means is that human languages divide that space in a skewed way,” Gibson says. Therefore, there are many more color chips that most people would call “blue” than there are chips that people would define as “yellow” or “red.” This reflects the fact that while the warm colors and cool colors occupy a similar amount of space in a chart of the 80 colors used in the test, most languages divide the warmer regions into more color words than the cooler regions. Across all of these languages, the researchers found the same pattern. The researchers then compared their results to data from the World Color Survey, which performed essentially the same task for 110 languages around the world, all spoken by nonindustrialized societies. The researchers found that the color chips labeled in Tsimane’, English, and Spanish were all ordered such that cool-colored chips had higher average surprisals than warm-colored chips (reds, yellows, and oranges). Furthermore, chips that people tend to label consistently with just one word have a low surprisal rate, while chips that different people tend to label with different words have a higher surprisal rate. When a particular word (such as “blue” or “green”) is used to describe many color chips, then one of these chips has higher surprisal.

Once they had these data, the researchers applied an information theory technique that allowed them to calculate a feature they called “surprisal,” which is a measure of how consistently different people describe, for example, the same color chip with the same color word. The researchers asked about 40 Tsimane’ speakers to name 80 color chips, which were evenly distributed across the visible spectrum of color. Working with Conway, who was then an associate professor studying visual perception at Wellesley College, Gibson decided to delve further into this variability. He found that most Tsimane’ consistently use words for white, black, and red, but there is less agreement among them when naming colors such as blue, green, and yellow. Gibson began this investigation of color after accidentally discovering during another study that there is a great deal of variation in the way colors are described by members of the Tsimane’, a tribe that lives in remote Amazonian regions of Bolivia. Other authors are MIT postdoc Richard Futrell, postdoc Julian Jara-Ettinger, former MIT graduate students Kyle Mahowald and Leon Bergen, NEI postdoc Sivalogeswaran Ratnasingam, MIT research assistant Mitchell Gibson, and University of Rochester Assistant Professor Steven Piantadosi.

The paper’s other senior author is Bevil Conway, an investigator at the National Eye Institute (NEI). Every language has this amazing similar ordering of colors, so that reds are more consistently communicated than greens or blues,” says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the first author of the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Sept. “When we look at it, it turns out it’s the same across every language that we studied. This leads to more consistent labeling of warmer colors by different speakers of the same language, the researchers found. This pattern, which they found across more than 100 languages, may reflect the fact that most objects that stand out in a scene are warm-colored, while cooler colors such as green and blue tend to be found in backgrounds, the researchers say. In a new study, MIT cognitive scientists have found that languages tend to divide the “warm” part of the color spectrum into more color words, such as orange, yellow, and red, compared to the “cooler” regions, which include blue and green. Some languages use as few as three color categories (words corresponding to black, white, and red), while the languages of industrialized cultures use up to 10 or 12 categories. The human eye can perceive millions of different colors, but the number of categories human languages use to group those colors is much smaller.

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