We see things differently in winter compared with how we see them in summer, according to a new study that sheds light on how humans process colors, particularly the color known as “unique yellow.”
Humans identify four unique hues—blue, green, yellow, and red—that don’t appear to contain mixtures of other colors.
Unique yellow—meaning no hint of a green or red—is particularly interesting, scientists said, because it is stable across large populations—everyone agrees on what unique yellow looks like despite the fact that people’s eyes and vision are often very different.
In the Summer
Researchers wanted to find out why unique yellow is so stable and what factors might make it change. They thought that unique yellow might depend not on the biology of the eye but on the color of the natural world.
