[vivekseth]

I think humans can see a wider range of blues and greens than they can yellows and reds. Check out: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/CI...

I believe this chart roughly corresponds to the colors humans can perceive for different light combinations. I see greens/blues in most of the chart and the colors I consider to be red, orange, or yellow occupy very small regions of the image.

Since greens/blues have a wider range, maybe that's why designers tend to use them as the main color?

[jaypea]

Another factor to consider is our acuity varies across that color gamut (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAdam_ellipse). So we're best at distinguishing subtle differences in blues and worst at seeing variation of greens. The number of shades of blue or green you can see would be the number of MacAdam's ellipses which fit in each region - so it looks like we can see the most shades of blue but green isn't much of an outlier (depending on how you group pinks/purples etc.).

[vobios]

Speaking of distinguishing subtle differences in blues, there is actually a linguistic component.

English and Russian color terms divide the color spectrum differently. Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”). We investigated whether this linguistic difference leads to differences in color discrimination. We tested English and Russian speakers in a speeded color discrimination task using blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task. These effects were stronger for difficult discriminations (i.e., when the colors were perceptually close) than for easy discriminations (i.e., when the colors were further apart). English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage in any of the conditions. These results demonstrate that (i) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference).

Source: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0701644104

[jungler]

Most folks would disagree and say that blue is actually the least sensitive to changes and green the most, and allocate precision accordingly. See remarks here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_color

[jaypea]

sorry I misspoke by saying shades - the MacAdam's ellipses are measured for the same brightness so only apply to variation in hue/saturation. So I think we can see more shades of green but more hues/saturations of blue?

[Jarwain]

This reminds me of the development of 'color words'. Most languages start off creating words to differentiate light from dark, followed by a word to describe red, then yellow (or green), followed by green (or yellow), then blue, then brown.