[ExI] hard science

[William Flynn Wallace]

I was speaking of tetrachromacy that a few women have.  Here's the link:

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-super-human-vision
bill w


On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> spike <spike66 at att.net> , 4/5/2014 8:12 PM:
>
>  She: "When a
> man picks out patterns, he picks out his favorite countertop, his favorite
> linoleum, his favorite cabinets and his favorite appliance style, all very
> nice patterns, but none of it matches.  This all matches.  So my question
> is, what woman helped you pick out these patterns?"
>
> I don't know how the heck women do that.  My bride is just as much an
> engineer and math geek as I am, yet she also has this aesthetic thing
> going.
> It is hard to say if that sense is somehow embedded in ovaries or if
> somehow
> that talent is blocked by testicles.
>
>
> 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:
> http://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/frames/color/Aurthur2007.pdf
>
>
> "A substantial amount of research shows that women not only have larger
> vocabularies when talking about colors but that they appear to have also
> superior
> abilities to match and discriminate colors. For example, Perez-Carpinell,
> Baldovi,
> de Fez, and Castro (1998) found that women were more accurate for chroma
> and
> hue than men. Also, in a speeded naming task, females named the colors
> more
> quickly than did the males, suggesting that women may possess a faster
> retrieval
> of color labels (Elias, Saucier, Nylen, & Cheesman, 2003). It is perhaps
> possible
> that different patterns of socialization for males and females encourage a
> greater
> awareness of color among women (Bimler, Kirkland, & Jameson, 2004).
>
> Interestingly, such results have been reported across many cultures. Yang
> (2000) studied male and female Chinese speakers who were undergraduate
> English majors and found women possessed more color vocabulary (both in
> English and in Chinese), were more elaborate in the Chinese translations
> of the
> color words, and showed superiority in the accuracy of color-lexicon
> matching.
> In a study in Spain, accessing color words was found to be easier for the
> females
> (Delgado & Prieto, 2003). When Nepalese residents were asked to name all
> of
> the colors that they could, females consistently listed more color terms
> than did
> males (Thomas et al., 1978)."
>
> There are also differences in color preferences:
> http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(07)01559-X.pdf
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886900002312?np=y
> (which are not affected by sexual preferences, BTW, despite a link between
> the Bem brain male/female scale and color preferences)
>
> 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.
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7624204
>
> 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.
>
>
> Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford
> University
>
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