![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Brain6.jpg\" "\\"brain\\"")
When looking for a lemon in the fridge, its colour is a useful characteristic to think about\u2014the bright yellow will stand out from the green of the salad or the red of the tomatoes. However, when putting the lemon in your drink, its colour is a less relevant characteristic than, for example, its taste. Does the brain\u2019s representation of the concept \u201clemon\u201d actually change depending on what you\u2019re doing? Might it even change depending on what you were doing?<\/p>\n
Although it is known that the brain organises objects by their shapes, functions, and even by how they are manipulated with the hands, until now, scientists have failed to show that colour is also important to how the brain stores object knowledge. Now, however, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) researcher, Eiling Yee, together with colleagues Sarah Ahmed and Sharon Thompson-Shill, from the University of Pennsylvania, has shown that the brain does organise objects according to colour, and furthermore, that colour\u2019s significance depends on what we have recently been doing<\/strong>. This dependence on context explains why it has been so difficult, until now, to show that colour does influence how the brain organizes concepts.<\/p>\n The conclusions of this research shed light on how the brain manages information, and also show that people may vary in how their individual brains do this. In the future, this will be useful for understanding how knowledge develops, and how it breaks down as we age or suffer brain damage.<\/p>\n The study that Yee and colleagues conducted has been published in the journal Psychological Science<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe study shows that after a person performs a task in which colour is important, the brain weighs colour more heavily immediately afterwards. In other words, if a person had just been thinking about which colour to paint their living room, then when subsequently thinking about lemons, yellowness is a more prominent part of the \u2018lemon\u2019 concept than if they had just been tasting a sauce, in which case a lemon\u2019s sourness might be more prominent \u201d, explains Yee.<\/p>\n In short, recent experience influences the brain\u2019s conceptual representations of objects<\/strong>.<\/p>\n To draw these conclusions, the researchers designed an experiment with 120 participants who took part in behavioural tests. Half of the participants first performed a task which conditioned the brain to concentrate on colour, and then were tested on whether reading a word like \u201ccanary\u201d helped them to recognise the meaning of words referring to objects of the same colour, like \u201clemon\u201d. The other half of participants skipped the colour conditioning task (until later). Yee and colleagues showed that words referring to objects with similar colours do \u201cactivate\u201d each other, but only if the brain has recently been thinking about colour.<\/p>\n The results of the experiment indicate that colour plays a role in how the brain organises knowledge. According to Yee, concepts such as \u201clemon\u201d and \u201ccanary\u201d overlap in the brain.<\/p>\n Changing Conceptualisation<\/strong><\/p>\n However, according to Yee, the most interesting part of the experiment is the demonstration that the brain\u2019s concepts of objects change depending on the context. \u201cOur brains seem to make the \u201clemon\u201d and \u201ccanary\u201d concepts more similar if we have recently been concentrating on colour. This shows how malleable the brain\u2019s representations of the objects around us are.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, Yee says that there are individual differences between people in the conceptualisation of colour<\/strong>. This may be because some people tend to concentrate more than others on the colour of things, so that colour is more important in these people\u2019s brains than in other people\u2019s when organising knowledge<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language press release via MedicalXpress: When looking for a lemon in the fridge, its colour is a useful characteristic to think about\u2014the… 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],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4101"}],"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=4101"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4131,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4101\/revisions\/4131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}