(Credit: Shutterstock) Paint a room in light colors to make it look bigger. Wear black to look slimmer. These are well known facts about how color influences our perception—but it's not all black and white. New research from Boston College is showing that color saturation — how pure a color is — affects how we perceive an objects' size. The more saturated a color is, the bigger something looks, the researchers say, with attendant implications for marketing and design. More than that, however, their findings also hint at how much more we need to learn about the ways colors influence cognition.
The impetus for the study came not from the literature but from a previous life. Henrik Hagtvedt, now an associate professor of marketing at Boston College, was for nearly a decade an artist whose work garnered international exhibitions. In the mid-2000s he switched careers and became an academic, focusing ...
