I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
100%. It's like being asked is this black or white and being shown 50% grey.
That’s the point of this. To find out where in that spectrum your vision lands, not to get a perfect score.
The attempted point being to measure and compare how people classify colors between blue and green when given a false dichotomy between the two.
But it cannot do that without bias, since people always have the third choice to drop out when they don't like their choices. There is also another bias, which is people will just select some random option when they want to say something equivalent to "blue-green" but don't have the choice, then they get a result biased in that direction but what has actually happened is they have given up. This random choice might be culturally biased towards people's preferred color. I personally selected green when that occurred for me and then just sat on green hammering that. Oh, I'm more willing to say green than other people? Meaningless, I wouldn't have called those colors green in a conversation.
When presented in a forum people also have the choice of criticising the false dichotomy which is what you are experiencing here. The point of posting it here is to get this sort of feedback, so...
OP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.
correctness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...
It should probably alternate between blue/notblue... green/notgreen. I hit the same wall. Second question asked if blue/green when it was neither... and I really mean neither. I don't see cyan as a shade of blue or green, rather much like I don't see green as a shade of blue or yellow.
Huh. I consider cyan to be blue, but it turns out it's made by mixing equal parts of blue and green light on an RGB display.
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
yeah I've always thought of cyan as just "blue, but really bright", which does make sense - you're going from 0, 0, 100 (blue) to 0, 100, 100 (cyan) so it's twice as far from pure black. I also see pure cyan as being much more blue than green.
There's no way for me to answer truthfully whether teal is blue or green. It is neither. Anything I give gives a false answer. The data is invalid.
How would you feel about a test for "teal or blue" or "teal or green?" You still need to make binary choices, just along different boundaries. Would it make any difference?
Incorrect, it either lies on the blue side or the green side, you must choose. Neither is not an option.
If you gave me the exact same color code 20 times I might give you green 10 times and blue the other 10 because I genuinely can't tell the difference. So it's not a binary like you're claiming.
If you did that, your score would be 50%, that’s how this works.
Sometimes the answer can be “I reject the premise.”
I’m sure you’ve had conversations where that’s the answer you want to give.
I chose to close the tab.
But reproducibility should be the point. As a result of the structure it approaches an asymptote from one side or the other. I took it once and approached from green and my greenness was 77%, a second time it approached from blue and my blueness was 68%.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
>correctness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...
Realistically there is a broad range that we all can acknowledge is neither, but is instead teal, and forcing a binary choice means people just choose randomly.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. I understand that there's a continuum in reality, but psychologically, I still tend to perceive each shade as discretely either blue or green, especially when the shade is presented in isolation. Words like "teal", "cyan", etc. aren't really part of my normal vocabulary and to the extent that they are, I would think of them as subsets of blue or green, not disjoint sets.
I think the test can be fairly criticised on the basis that it is assuming everyone's psychological colour space has a discrete boundary between blue and green, which clearly isn't the case for some people (like you), but it is for others (like me).
It's so remarkable how many people here refuse to understand your point. It's like, there is no right or wrong, no perfect score, just pure subjectiveness, and they can't handle it. If I wasn't convinced this site is entirely bots before, I might be now....
It is enlightening to see who has been fixed on math proofs as testing and who has been exposed to observational testing. Seems many people have been brain washed into the former, forgetting the latter exists.
But that is wrong. This doesn't test colour perception or vision, it tests verbal classification of colour perception into a forced binary. Everyone could be perceiving the colour qualia 100% identically, but simply choosing different linguistic cutpoints, meaning you can't say this is about vision / perception at all (it may just be about language use).
I think the premise could be stated more clearly. It is a boolean choice. What do you think it is closer to.
Once I figured it, I tried it 2 more times ... and got different results :) but the new results were consistent.
Agreed, there is no clear premise. Of course that different people looking at the same object will use different colour words is a triviality that anyone over, say, 10 years old knows. If that's the premise of the site, it is boring. People are getting excited because they think this implies something about differences in vision or perception... but it doesn't, that requires much more cleverness to test.
Or suspension of expectations…
It’s not really the same, because black and white strongly connote being at the far ends of their continuum (lightness), and are thus opposites, whereas blue and green are more vaguely specified as nearby spots on their continuum (hue).
Yeah, but is the gray to you more look more black or more white? That's the point.
It's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
That is the point of the exercise though. Is 50% really where you draw the line?
But the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.
I see it as having a blue component and a green component. If the mixture has more green than blue, then it's green.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
Ok, but presumably you can make a test that goes from 50% gray to 100% black and you have to say "this is black" or "this is gray"
No scientific line. But where does your mind put it if asked without being told which it is? This test is about where you perceive that line to be.
but when does turquoise start and end and green starts and blue ends? or is there just another color there between them. And then what about that color?
I think you're (accidentally?) hitting on exactly the point there.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
Are there really people whose language treats “cyan” and “turquoise” as distinct colors which are not in the “blue-green” family?
I don't know if there are people who treat turquoise and aqua as distinct, but I certainly treat them as distinct from blue (azure, cobalt) and green. Several of the colors around the mid range in the linked page are not colors I would use the words "blue" or "green" for. That doesn't mean that I have strict rules here; I don't actually know if I would call what you call "cyan" turquoise or blue; ditto plenty of other words like "seafoam." That's kind of my point -- modulo another poster's comment about this being a test of bad monitor calibration, it's really more about language than about color.
I think there's another set of questions here -- why is "blue-green family" a thing in your mind, rather than "blue-yellow family"? Is there a "red-blue family"? "Orange-blue"?
Our green cones are the most sensitive and their range significantly overlaps with red cones, so it's only natural that going from green towards red you'll be able to make clearer distinctions between colors than the other way.
Also, yellow-blue and red-green are opponents that can't be mixed because of how our retinas preprocess the signals from cones. Therefore, you obviously end up with blue-green (cyan), red-yellow (orange), yellow-green (lime) and blue-red (magenta, which actually doesn't exist on the light spectrum) families of related colors.
Many Slavic languages do that, as well as Albanian for some reason?
Russian speakers broadly consider sky blue / turquoise / cyan a distinct color right between green and blue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
Although the question "is the color distinct and basic or just a shade?" is very subjective. Is pink distinct or a shade of red/purple? Is purple distinct or a shade of red/blue? Is green distinct or a shade of blue? (it's well-known that in Japanese green separated from blue only relatively recently, with very bluish traffic lights and other quirks included)
I totally agree with you but it defeats the purpose of the site. It got to an obviously cyan color and I couldn't answer either way (it's not blue or green) so I closed it.
I closed it also. What's going to happen is all the people who care about the ambiguousness leave, so the resulting population is a bad sample even of the people who open the site in the first place.
Same here, it's often neither blue nor green, so this experiment is pointless.
Thats the exact point of this experiment to define the inbetween and move it to either green or blue.
:/
Wrong way to do it. We know from psychometrics that forced binaries like this just create junk (people disagree with the question, so just choose a forced answer based on some heuristic for each such question like "closest to my mouse / finger" or "most socially desirable" or "same as last time"). So you aren't measuring what you think when you force choice like this.
If you're going to go with linguistic self-report and a single item, you really want something like an 11-point Likert scale. A smart design might get e.g. a person's rating of "blue-ness vs. green-ness" on an 11-point scale, then determine the optimal cutpoint via e.g. clustering, logistic regression, or some other method, to really get something meaningful.
Is it really junk though? There are several comments in this thread like “people tell me I call stuff blue that they think is green and this quiz confirms that.”
Forced binary choices on single-item, self-report questions produce scientific junk, absolutely. This kind of design / approach encourages not only magnitude errors, but also sign errors (you can't even trust the direction of the observed effect).
IMO, growing up, unless you lived under a rock, it seems obvious to me that you will have experienced different people pointing at the same colour and uttering very different colour labels (pink vs. red, blue vs. green, black vs. deep blue/purple, etc) from the labels you might have applied yourself. Differing/shared colour perception isn't exactly a rare kind of topic (almost is like the canonical stoner topic, also common online), so I'd be a bit surprised if this demo is actually introducing anyone to this concept already. Any excitement is surely from other implications people think the demo has.
But unfortunately there are no interesting implications from what this site shows. Yes, it demonstrates the boring fact that: "it isn't clear how different people assign different color labels to the same physical stimuli" (and yes, this is FALSELY assuming that everyone's monitors/screens are the same too), but if you didn't already know this... I'm not sure exactly what social context you could have possibly grown up in.
That makes about as much sense as trying to compete for who can provide the most wrong answer for "2+2="
It's a linguistics thing, it's about word usage more than about colour. You ask someone to get a book off the shelf, and you say "get the blue book" and the person is confused because they see a green book.
We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
I think the "numeric" equivalent to this would be "is this a few/many?"
And you would get some number arguing how "several" is a distinct category in the same way this post has people talking about cyan.
I interpreted the buttons to mean "this is bluer than it is green" and "this is greener than it is blue".
In linguistics this sort of thinking comes from 'basic color term' theory, which lays out heuristics for deciding if a word for a color in a given language is 'basic'. 2 things going against these blue-green terms are:
* They refer to specific objects (a duck and a stone), eventually these referents can be transcended though, like with the case of orange. * Their frequency is roughly similar to each other (along with cyan, aqua, etc.), so there's no one term for this range (e.g. there's no doubt in a corpus of English that red is the basic color term for its spectrum).