Nerve fibres in the brain of a young healthy adult. Credit: Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0)
In an effort to answer the question of whether different people perceive colours in the same way, neuroscientists in Germany have revealed we share the same responses in visual areas of the brain when seeing certain colours.
“Does a given colour elicit comparable neural activity in two different observers? Do colours elicit area-specific response patterns?” write the authors in the paper published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
“To address these questions, we predicted what colour someone is seeing based on their brain activity, using only knowledge of colour responses from other observers’ brains.”
The researchers analysed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data obtained from 13 female and 2 male participants with normal vision.
The participants were tasked with watching a screen which randomly displayed a colour – red, green or yellow – and pressed a button when they perceived the colour stimulus had either increased or decreased in brightness.
The researchers used an approach called ‘shared response modelling’ to determine which brain responses to certain colours were common among the participants. They then showed it was possible to use the data obtained from other participants to predict the colour and luminance of the stimuli observed by another individual.
“We can’t say that one person’s red looks the same as another person’s red. But to see that some sensory aspects of a subjective experience are conserved across people’s brains is new,” says co-author Dr Michael Bannert from the University of Tübingen, Germany.