Originally Posted by
BobH
Women see more shades of colors than men do or can. It seems as though in reds for instance women are more able to see variations in the shade etc. of reds. I was watching a program where 8 color cards where presented. Men would typically pick a difference in 4 or 5 at the most. Women on the other hand picked all 8 cards as being different. Which they were.
There has been a lot of research on cross-cultural color differences (for example, my Mexican wife calling something "yellow" that I would call "green") and this has also included studies of male/female differences in color-naming experiments. Most researchers feel this does not represent any fundamental difference in the actually ability to "see" color differences. For example, other experiments seem to show that subjects are equally able to visually distinguish one color card from another...even though they may not have difference color names to distinguish the two. In other words, difference cultures may use different color words but all humans seem to have fundamentally the same color vision. By the way, there is a language from northern Africa that technically only has two "color" words: "Light" and "dark." Of course the people who speak this language are just as able to see colors as anyone else; they just doesn't obsess about the differences.
There are, however, some researchers who feel there many be a biologic basis for the differences in male/female color-naming abilities. Some genetic evidence exists that females (or some females) may have 4-pigment vision (vs. regular 3-pigment vision).
I was thinking after I posted my earlier reply how many scale judges are color blind? I would guess that over the years at least some were. Who's to know? I doubt if any judges are tested for it lol.
And how many could tell you what color "teal" is!
