Monday, February 9, 2009

How Color Impacts Your Thinking

Submitted by Will on Saturday, 7 February 2009

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The NY Times posted the results of some interesting research into how color impacts cognition. The bottom line is, if you want to boost your attention to detail, surround yourself with red, and if you want to boost creativity, then blue is your color.

Red groups did better on tests of recall and attention to detail, like remembering words or checking spelling and punctuation. Blue groups did better on tests requiring imagination, like inventing creative uses for a brick or creating toys from shapes.

Link: Color Study Looks at Effects of Red and Blue - NYTimes.com

So, I suppose that creating blue rooms at work for the creatives and red for the accountants would be a good idea.

When Dr. Zhu’s subjects were asked what red or blue made them think of, most said that red represented caution, danger or mistakes, and that blue symbolized peace and openness. Subjects were quicker to unscramble anagrams of “avoidance related” words like “danger” when the anagrams were on red backgrounds, and quicker with anagrams of positive, “approach related” words like “adventure” when they were on blue backgrounds.

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