I am looking out my hotel room window in Hiroshima in this very instant, and I even got my wife to confirm it: The traffic lights definitely are GREEN.
I'm glad you mentioned that you had your wife confirm, because I'm convinced my wife sees more colours than I do, and I can't be the only one. I've had this exact discussion.
What colour is this? Blue.
No, can't you see it's green? Maybe it has some green in it
Okay, so is it blue or green? Yes!
Yes, on average women can perceive more colors than men [1]
Anecdotally, in high school we all took this test for a class [2] and the girls did a lot better than us. Although some guys were able to score pretty well on it. I don’t remember if this was the exact test but it’s very similar.
As a dude who scores perfect on these color tests (this is my superpower), it’s funny on male-dominated places like here and reddit when people discuss logo color changes.
They’re always long threads of very confident people saying how there isn’t even a difference and I’m like lol
However, there are people who are tetrachromats, have cones most sensitive to a fourth frequency of light in their eyes, and those people are also overwhelmingly women.
If I recall correctly there has only been one human actually shown to have tetrachomacy, and the supposition that there are a exceedingly small number of additional ones. I think there was a mechanism proposed that would mean they were all biologically female, but can't remember details.
It certainly seems to be rare enough to have no practical impact (except to perhaps the tetrachromat, who presumably has different metatmers perception etc.)
As far as I understand it takes having two X chromosomes with different versions of the gene that encodes the receptors for green, so only women can be tetrachromats.
" Best Score for your Gender -1000000
Worst Score for your Gender 1700045439
About your score: A lower score is better, with ZERO being a perfect score. The circle graph displays the regions of the color spectrum where your hue discrimination is low."
I hate this kind of stuff. WTF is that Best Score?
It goes from -2147483648 to 2147483647 for me, which I'm interpreting as "our langauge doesn't distinguish signed from unsigned integers, and nor do our developers". Possibly there's also some lack of validation of client-side data involved.
I wonder if there might be a language aspect to this, with males in the US generally having less familiarity with words for the in between colors leading to more difficulty distinguishing between them, with people with more words for greenish shades for example having an easier time seeing different shades of green.
I'd have to dig up references, but I understand it's a pretty well documented effect that having words for colors is directly related to a population seeing more distinction for those colors.
If I recall, some early societies didn't have a distinction between green and blue. Given that blue often doesnt show up naturally outside of the sky and it's reflections. And in those populations they would be much less sensitive to distinctions in blue-green.
For early societies, you might be thinking of the Greeks, though apparently it's somewhat common between languages?[1] For Greek the idea to originate from Homer's writings, with colors being more described in terms of how light or dark they are versus specific hues.[2]
It's pretty clear that it's "Based on the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test," and "this is not a replacement for the full test!" I think if you did particularly poorly on the online test then it's worth looking at whether you need to do the full test, as you might have colour blindness (or a terrible monitor). But a perfect score isn't super-meaningful.
Looking at this test on my monitors I would bet it's the 'terrible monitor' before color blindness by a longshot, one shows pretty good color the other is entirely washed out.
Fun test! I'd note for others, the quality of your screen can make a difference - I found one of the lines a lot easier on my phone (first try) than on my computer (second try) - though I got perfect both times.
I edited it in like under a minute afterwards, you may have opened the page right in the middle. I don't usually bother with an "Edit:" note if it's that fast.
Colors are not necessarily a single wavelength, and the human visual system can't distinguish between identical "tristimulus" caused by a single wavelength or a mixture of wavelengths. This is why color monitors with red, green, and blue pixels work. The red, green, and blue are designed to stimulate your long, medium, and short wavelength receptors. Models like CIE1931 map wavelengths to tristimulus values, which your monitor then maps to the right intensity of its red, green, and blue. (Display technology is, of course, imperfect. You can see redder reds, greener greens, and bluer blues than your monitor can emit, though newer monitors with Adobe RGB or DCI-P3 have redder reds. It's also possible that the green light from your monitor is not perfectly stimulating only your medium wavelength receptors.)
Some colors that look very real cannot be a single wavelength of light, like magenta. That color is a figment of our imaginations. (Rather, there is no wavelength of light that stimulates your long wave receptors and short wave receptors without stimulating the medium wave receptors. But, magenta does, because it's actually a blue wavelength and a red wavelength.)