They're the questions we've asked since we were children: Are the colours that I see different from the colours that you see? Is my red your red, my yellow your yellow, and my slightly off-teal the same shade you're seeing?
You've probably ended up concluding that we'll just never know. After all, even to psychologists and neuroscientists, much of the relationship between how we experience the world and our measurable brain activity remains a mystery. This is known as 'qualia': the subjective, qualitative aspects of the conscious experience.
But now, a new study published in scientific journal PNAS may have an answer. While there are still many mysteries to solve, the findings suggest our perceptions of colour may be close to universal.
Scientists at Kyoto University, in Japan, investigated whether children see colour differently to each other and to adults.
“We were motivated by fundamental questions about how children perceive and experience the world,” said Yusuke Moriguchi, corresponding author of the study.
That can be difficult to do with young children, because of their limited language skills, especially in children too young to articulate what they can see. That’s why the scientists developed a programme, accessible even to three-year-olds, that did not rely on verbal descriptions but instead asked participants to rate the similarities between different colours.
The researchers chose nine colours and asked participants to rate their similarities on a four-point scale, from 'very similar' to 'very different'. The participants were put into three groups: Japanese children aged 3–12, Chinese children aged 6–8, and Japanese adults.
What the scientists found was a remarkable similarity between the participants’ answers – despite changes in children's understanding of different colours as they grow older, including knowing more words to describe them.
The subtle age-related differences they did find suggest that, as we grow up, our perception of colour changes. But the scientists concluded that young children experience colours in almost the same way as adults – and that cultural differences, existing between Japanese and Chinese children in this study, did not seem to have much of an effect either.
Nevertheless, the researchers advise that further studies, involving people from different cultural backgrounds, would be necessary to confirm these results.
They also say their study could be used to inform future investigations into young children’s perceptions of the world. Moriguchi said: “Our study provides a new methodology for scientifically investigating conscious experiences in young children.”
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