*Image From CoverPop.com...Research on how color affects cognition has yielded inconsistent findings, says Rui (Juliet) Zhu, a consumer psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Some studies find that red enhances cognition, for example, while other studies suggest the opposite. Zhu suspected this might be because the work didn't pay enough attention to which types of cognition were being affected. Red might enhance performance on some tasks, she reasoned, while impairing performance on others.
To investigate, Zhu and graduate student Ravi Mehta manipulated the background color on a computer screen while volunteers, mostly undergraduate students, performed a variety of tasks. For those that required attention to detail--such as proofreading a list of addresses--participants were slightly more accurate when the background was red, compared to blue or white.
Blue, on the other hand, stimulated creativity. When subjects were asked to name as many uses for a brick as they could think of in a minute, they came up with more creative responses (such as "to use it as a scratch post for animals") and earned higher creativity scores from a jury of their student peers when the background was blue, Mehta and Zhu report online today in Science.
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