Shared understanding of color among sighted and blind adults

Empiricist philosophers such as Locke famously argued that people born blind might learn arbitrary color facts (e.g., marigolds are yellow) but would lack color understanding. Contrary to this intuition, we find that blind and sighted adults share causal understanding of color, despite not always agreeing about arbitrary color facts. Relative to sighted people, blind individuals are less likely to generate yellow for banana and red for stop sign but make similar generative inferences about real and novel objects' colors, and provide similar causal explanations. For example, people infer that two natural kinds (e.g., bananas) and two artifacts with functional colors (e.g., stop signs) are more likely to have the same color than two artifacts with nonfunctional colors (e.g., cars). People develop intuitive and inferentially rich theories of color regardless of visual experience. Linguistic communication is more effective at aligning intuitive theories than knowledge of arbitrary facts.

Automated summary

Studies have shown that blind and sighted adults share causal understanding of color, despite not always agreeing about arbitrary color facts. Blind individuals are less likely to make predictions based on common knowledge of colors, such as assuming bananas are yellow or stop signs are red, but they provide similar causal explanations for the colors of real and novel objects. This suggests that people develop intuitive and inferentially rich theories of color regardless of visual experience, and that linguistic communication is more effective in aligning intuitive theories than knowledge of arbitrary facts.