A different shade of thought
In the Russian language, there is no single word for blue. Instead, the color is split into two distinct categories: goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark blue. To a Russian speaker, these are as different as red and pink are to an English speaker. This linguistic distinction, explored in a 2007 study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, affects how the brain perceives color. The research supports the idea of linguistic relativity, which suggests the language we speak can shape our perception of the world.
The experiment, led by Jonathan Winawer, tested native Russian and English speakers on a speeded color discrimination task. Participants were shown a triad of blue squares on a computer screen, one on top and two on the bottom. Their task was to quickly and accurately identify which of the two bottom squares was identical in color to the top one. The shades of the squares were selected from a range of 20 blue stimuli that spanned the goluboy/siniy border. Sometimes the non-matching square was from the same Russian color category as the matching one (e.g., both were siniy). In other trials, the non-matching square was from the opposite category (e.g., one was siniy and the other goluboy).