ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Shared understanding of color among sighted and blind adults.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- The unity of sense and mind: A review of cross-domain mapping.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Adjectives improve color perception in visually impaired people through multisensory stimulation.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Revealing emergent human-like conceptual representations from language prediction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Gestural and Verbal Evidence of Conceptual Representation Differences in Blind and Sighted Individuals.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Large language models without grounding recover non-sensorimotor but not sensorimotor features of human concepts.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Learning about color from language.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- The origin of color categories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Memory and Representation of Vision-Related Verbs in Early Blind Individuals.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- Large language models predict human sensory judgments across six modalities.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Touch to learn: Multisensory input supports word learning and processing.Developmental science · 2024Article
- Strong Prediction: Language Model Surprisal Explains Multiple N400 Effects.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Consensus Paper: Current Perspectives on Abstract Concepts and Future Research Directions.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Lack of Visual Experience Affects Multimodal Language Production: Evidence From Congenitally Blind and Sighted People.Cognitive science · 2023Article
- A case study in phenomenology of visual experience with retinal prosthesis versus visual-to-auditory sensory substitution.Neuropsychologia · 2022Article
- The vision of dreams: from ontogeny to dream engineering in blindness.Journal of clinical sleep medicine : JCSM : official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine · 2022Review
- The Topo-Speech sensory substitution system as a method of conveying spatial information to the blind and vision impaired.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Empiricist philosophers such as Locke famously argued that people born blind might learn arbitrary color facts (e.g., marigolds are yellow) but would lack color understanding. Contrary to this intuition, we find that blind and sighted adults share causal understanding of color, despite not always agreeing about arbitrary color facts. Relative to sighted people, blind individuals are less likely to generate "yellow" for banana and "red" for stop sign but make similar generative inferences about real and novel objects' colors, and provide similar causal explanations. For example, people infer that two natural kinds (e.g., bananas) and two artifacts with functional colors (e.g., stop signs) are more likely to have the same color than two artifacts with nonfunctional colors (e.g., cars). People develop intuitive and inferentially rich "theories" of color regardless of visual experience. Linguistic communication is more effective at aligning intuitive theories than knowledge of arbitrary facts.
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Registered trials
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