<html><head></head><body><div><span title="spike66@att.net">spike</span><span class="detail"> <spike66@att.net></span> , 4/5/2014 8:12 PM:<br><blockquote class="mori" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:2px blue solid;padding-left:1ex;"> She: "When a
<br>man picks out patterns, he picks out his favorite countertop, his favorite
<br>linoleum, his favorite cabinets and his favorite appliance style, all very
<br>nice patterns, but none of it matches. This all matches. So my question
<br>is, what woman helped you pick out these patterns?"
<br>
<br>I don't know how the heck women do that. My bride is just as much an
<br>engineer and math geek as I am, yet she also has this aesthetic thing going.
<br>It is hard to say if that sense is somehow embedded in ovaries or if somehow
<br>that talent is blocked by testicles.</blockquote></div><div><br></div>I don't think it is primarily sex-determined. Testosterone is known to affect spatial navigation ability (essentially turning navigation into more dead reckoning-based than landmark-based, which is good in environments low on features) and estrogen is a bit of a memory enhancer. But none of the good papers on gender differences have anything about basic color perception. However, women do have a larger color vocabulary and better matching and memory abilities: <div>http://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/frames/color/Aurthur2007.pdf<br><div><blockquote class="mori" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:2px blue solid;padding-left:1ex;"></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>"A substantial amount of research shows that women not only have larger </div><div>vocabularies when talking about colors but that they appear to have also superior </div><div>abilities to match and discriminate colors. For example, Perez-Carpinell, Baldovi, </div><div>de Fez, and Castro (1998) found that women were more accurate for chroma and </div><div>hue than men. Also, in a speeded naming task, females named the colors more </div><div>quickly than did the males, suggesting that women may possess a faster retrieval </div><div>of color labels (Elias, Saucier, Nylen, & Cheesman, 2003). It is perhaps possible </div><div>that different patterns of socialization for males and females encourage a greater </div><div>awareness of color among women (Bimler, Kirkland, & Jameson, 2004). </div><div><br></div><div>Interestingly, such results have been reported across many cultures. Yang </div><div>(2000) studied male and female Chinese speakers who were undergraduate </div><div>English majors and found women possessed more color vocabulary (both in </div><div>English and in Chinese), were more elaborate in the Chinese translations of the </div><div>color words, and showed superiority in the accuracy of color-lexicon matching. </div><div>In a study in Spain, accessing color words was found to be easier for the females </div><div>(Delgado & Prieto, 2003). When Nepalese residents were asked to name all of </div><div>the colors that they could, females consistently listed more color terms than did </div><div>males (Thomas et al., 1978)."</div><div><br></div>There are also differences in color preferences:</div><div>http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(07)01559-X.pdf</div><div>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886900002312?np=y</div><div>(which are not affected by sexual preferences, BTW, despite a link between the Bem brain male/female scale and color preferences) </div><div><br></div><div>Now, my impression from all this is that for some reason there is just a lot of socialization going on training women across a lot of cultures to be good at color. Including the matching skills.</div><div>http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7624204</div><div><br></div><div>No, this socialization doesn't seem to happen naturally for us gay men: my matching skills are rather mediocre, hence my tendency towards an ultra-boring wardrobe. Presumably the cliché gay interior designer simply chose to somehow get the socialization. So now I just wonder if I missed something, an offering for a "Matching 101" course, when I was a teenager. I probably spent to much time writing BASIC on a black and white computer. </div><div><br><br>Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University</div></body></html>