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from the bird-in-hand-is-worth-4278190080-extra-colors dept.
Experiments show hummingbirds see colors you’ve never dreamed of:
The “V” in “ROYGBIV” stands for violet, sure, but that’s not actually the same thing as purple. There is no purple wavelength of light—it requires a mixture of both red and blue wavelengths. That makes it a “nonspectral color”—in fact, it's the only non spectral color humans see. It requires our brains to interpret signals from both red-sensitive and blue-sensitive cones in our eyes and to see that as a separate color.
[...] Working in Colorado over several summers, the researchers set up a pair of feeders for their experiments—one containing that delicious sugar water and one just containing boring old water. On top of each was a special LED light containing UV, blue, red, and green LEDs behind a diffuser, allowing the researchers to light up the feeder in a variety of nonspectral colors.
[...] The tests showed that the birds could see every nonspectral color that the researchers threw at them. Color pairs that were closer together in hue resulted in more mistaken visits but still beat the 50/50 odds of the control experiments.
Journal Reference:
Mary Caswell Stoddard, Harold N. Eyster, Benedict G. Hogan, et al. Wild hummingbirds discriminate nonspectral colors [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1919377117)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:30PM
This is another example of the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis. There is some truth to this, but also some reverse causation, and some falsehood.
How many names of colors do people not know? (Teal? Vermilion? Chartreuse? If the word exists but a person doesn't know it, how does that count?)
I think it's fairly clear that people can look at two different shades of yellow and call them yellow, but obviously tell them apart as well as well.
Personally I think as much as anything it is a matter of "there is a useful distinction to be made between these two things, so we'll create separate words as a short-hand." It's the same reason why in some languages, there is a word for "the object used to do XYZ" (such as to place a piece of paper which contains some writing which represents a person's political preferences) and other languages don't have it. You can still express the concept, but it's just not useful enough for the language to have developed the word for it.
Likewise, if a person works in a paint company or a clothing designer, they have a day-to-day use for subtle color differences others don't have, so they'll learn much more vocabulary for it. Others can tell the difference between Blue5 and Blue9, but don't have enough use to learn the specific word for them.