The wired blog network posted an intriguing article today. “Seeing Red: Tweak your brain with colors” is a summary of a Science article by Ravi Mehta and Juliet Zhu.
According to Brandon Keim who wrote the blog entry, Mehta and Zhu have demonstrated that colors enhance cognitive processing. Red was shown to enhance “attention demanding tasks” whereas blue enhanced “creativity.” He then reports Zhu as saying that red enhances performance on attention demanding tasks because it arouses neurobiological awareness and vigilance. Specifically,
“Think about red, and what comes to mind: stop lights, stop signs, danger, ambulances,” said Zhu. “People want to avoid those things, and that’s why they do better on detail-oriented tasks.”"
The reason people are more creative with blue stimuli is because “Blue is the color of the sky, the ocean, safety,” she said. “When their environment is safe, people are more explorative.”
What? We are neurobiologically wired to avoid red things such as stop lights and danger? It appears to me that the association between these things and the color red is a cultural convention. Besides, lots of things exist that are red that we don’t try to avoid such as apples, flowers, and hearts (admittedly, one might want to avoid hearts given the correct context).
As far as blue being associated with safe things such as the ocean, I find the logic even harder to swallow. Frankly, I find the ocean to be fairly scary. Beautiful, yes. Interesting, yes. But definitely not safe. In fact, I also don’t find blue in general to be associated with “safe.”
After I read the part of the post that I quoted above, I wanted more information. What type of attention demanding tasks? What was the creativity task? How was color presented to the subjects? How was performance measured?
Unfortunately, the article only said that subjects engaged in an approach/avoidance task and that they strongly avoided red and strongly approached blue. From this I assume they were engaged in some sort of computer task and that red and blue squares were being presented somehow and subjects had to respond with a joystick or mouse or by button presses. After the approach/avoidance task “Blue linked to higher scores on subsequent tests of creativity, and red with better performance on memory tests.”
That’s all. I would dismiss this out of hand but the research was published in Science which is one of the most reputable scientific publications. However, it was published in such a recent edition of Science that our library does not have the issue yet (“ARGH!”). Consequently, a critical read of the article itself to verify the accuracy of the reporter’s summary of the findings was not possible.
When I get access to the article I will let you know what I think about the research and Brandon Keim’s characterization of it.
