David DiSalvo is a science writer for places like Scientific American, with his own Brainspin column at the True/Slant Network, and another column he calls Neuronarrative.
He recently interviewed me about my book, The Vision Revolution…
Neuronarrative interview with me
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Mark Changizi is a professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the author of The Vision Revolution (Benbella Books).
I came across your interview on http://neuronarrative.wordpress.com, and after posting a response, I decided I was more than curious about getting a reaction, and thought I’d be more likely to find one here. I’ll paraphrase my post here:
I quote:
“…and I have shown that one needs that kind of peculiar color sense in order to pick up the color modulations that occur on our skin when we blush, blanch, redden with anger, and so on.”
“Our”. Like I noted in my original post, only a minority of the world’s percentage has the skin color that shows up phenomenon like blushing and “reddening” with anger. Being black and from Africa, I’ve never seen anyone blush, even though I’ve been living in America for six years, (your article actually reminded me that faces work that way, it never occurs to me that they do.) Yet, color – its beauty, its ugliness – it moves me in all the ways that seem universally human.
Did you account for this observation in your theory, and if so how? I’m truly curious, as it seems like a huge oversight to me.
Skin color signals are visible on any human (or primate, for that matter) skin — dark or light — something observed in the literature as far back as Darwin, and something I myself have seen even on the darkest of skins. (We’re usually not conscious of the color changes, but are, rather, conscious of the mood it indicates.)
Other than the baseline color difference for the different races, the color modulations of the skin (around baseline) as a function of mood are identical, and so our eyes (if not color blind) respond essentially in an identical fashion. Color vision and skin coloration changes are found on all primates with color vision.
I discuss these things in the original paper (in the supplementary materials) — http://www.changizi.com/colorface.pdf — and in my book, The Vision Revolution.
Although skin color changes are detectable on any skin, there can be difficulties in detecting them if it is a skin color with which one is not familiar. Skin coloration changes are harder to detect on a baseline skin color one is not familiar with, just as emotional modulations of voice are harder to detect on voices of unfamiliar accents. Here’s a relevant book excerpt and discussion on this: https://changizi.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/racism-is-due-to-perceptual-illusions/
Sincerely,
Mark