![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Gem.jpg\" "\\"emerald\\"")
How do we know what a lemon is, or a baseball? \u201cTheories that explain how our brains store knowledge say that similar knowledge is stored in similar places. So things that are related \u2013 in how they look, how they smell, and so on \u2013 should overlap in the brain,\u201d says Eiling Yee of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, & Language. In other words, the same part of your brain might store the information that both lemons and canaries are yellow.<\/p>\n
This sort of overlap has been shown for certain properties of objects, like their shape and function, or even for how you manipulate them with your hands. But scientists have mostly failed to find evidence that this is true for objects of the same color. One reason might be that color is not so important for how we interpret the world around us; after all, we have very little difficulty recognizing objects in black and white photos.<\/p>\n
But a new study by Yee, published in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that color is<\/em> in fact a part of how our brains organize knowledge of objects<\/strong>. And their attempt to prove this showed something even more important.<\/p>\n Yee says: \u201cOrdinarily, when you\u2019re thinking about emeralds, you don\u2019t also think about cucumbers. Even though they share the same color, that overlap is just not enough for one to make you think about the other\u201d. What Yee and co-authors Sarah Z. Ahmed and Sharon L. Thompson-Schill of the University of Pennsylvania discovered was that there are circumstances in which thinking about emeralds does<\/em> make you think, just a little, about cucumbers<\/strong>. The trick was to get people to first perform a (separate and unrelated) task in which color was relevant<\/strong>. After doing this, hearing words like \u201cemerald\u201d helped people retrieve the meanings of words like \u201ccucumber\u201d \u2013 that is, they recognized the second word of a pair faster if the objects referred to by the two words shared the same color.<\/p>\n This shows that color does play a part in how our brains organize knowledge about objects<\/strong>\u2014cucumbers and emeralds do overlap, and in the right circumstances, thinking about one makes you think a little about the other<\/strong>. But, Yee says \u201cit\u2019s particularly interesting that this only happened when people had already been pushed to think about color, because it shows that the relationships between things change depending on the context. If you\u2019ve just been thinking about color (even unconsciously), emeralds and cucumbers become more closely related than they would be if you hadn\u2019t been thinking about color. This shows just how malleable the brain\u2019s representations<\/strong> are.\u201d<\/p>\n So what it means for a lemon to be a lemon might very well change depending on what you were doing five minutes ago \u2013 if you had just been trying to decide on colors for your dining room the color of the lemon becomes salient, whereas if you had been outside playing ball its shape may become more important. But, of course, if you had just mixed a batch of cocktails, its taste would be what really counts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: How do we know what a lemon is, or a baseball? \u201cTheories that explain how our brains store knowledge say that similar… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[42,18,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2193"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2195,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193\/revisions\/2195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}