Unsure of the difference between ochre and ecru? Mauve and maize? Don't feel bad, because there's at least one color distinction you can handle: warm versus cool colors. You may have thought it was made up by your art teacher to torment you, but the concept is biologically based and universal to cultures around the world. Even a monkey knows the difference.
Researchers led by Youping Xiao at Mount Sinai School of Medicine based their study, in part, on data from the World Color Survey. That project, begun in the late 1970s, asked people from 110 cultures with unwritten languages to look at hundreds of color chips and name them.
Previous analysis of this survey found that no matter how many or how few color terms a language has--even if, say, speakers group together several English-language colors under one term--there's a certain "fault line" that these groupings almost never cross. ...
