Red is fast
Posted by turdslinger on February 27th, 2010 at 9:14 am
Canadian researches “have found that the eye perceives red as moving faster than other colours.”
And a hierarchy: “The researchers found that there’s a hierarchy of colours when it comes to speed of eye movement, with red at the top, then green, yellow and blue.”
The headline-worthiness of the article comes then from the leap that olympic judges may perceive athletes in red as moving slightly faster, which could be an advantage.
But this wasn’t a test for that. Instead of having “five participants” take part in “thousands of tests where they watched coloured dots moving on a computer screen,” you need a test where a legitimate sample of people watch objects of various colours moving in a more human-type of path, and see how they estimate speed. Presumably that’s been done before.
There’s also a leap to go from “the eye moves faster when tracking red objects” to “red objects seem to move faster.”
The study authors seem aware of the limits, but the article likes to blow things out of proportion.
Red is dangerous. Our body pays more attention to tracking it. Maybe wearing red makes the judges sense fear on some level. How about that? Stupid article.
