Update: This post was an Editor’s pick by Cristy Gelling at Science Seeker, and was included in Bora Zivkovic‘s top 10 science blog posts of the week.

Lately, I’ve got colors on the brain. In part I of this post I talked about the common roads that different cultures travel down as they name the colors in their world. And I came across the idea that color names are, in some sense, culturally universal. The way that languages carve up the visual spectrum isn’t arbitrary. Different cultures with independent histories often end up with the same colors in their vocabulary. Of course, the word that they use for red might be quite different – red, rouge, laal, whatever. Yet the concept of redness, that vivid region of the visual spectrum that we associate with fire, strawberries, blood or ketchup, is something that most cultures share.

So what? Does any of this really matter, when it comes to actually navigating the world? Shakespeare famously said that a rose by any other name smells just as sweet. So does red by another name look just as deep? And what if you didn’t have a name for red? Would it lose any of its luster? Would it be any harder to spot those red berries in the bush?

This question goes back to an idea by the American linguist Benjamin Whorf, who suggested that our language determines how we perceive the world. In his own words,

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language […] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar

This idea is known as linguistic relativity, and is commonly described by the blatantly false adage that Eskimos have a truckload of words to describe snow. (The number of Eskimo words for snow probably tells you more about gullibility and sloppy fact-checking than it does about language.)

Hyperbole aside, color actually provides a neat way to test Whorf’s hypothesis. A study in 1984 by Paul Kay and colleagues compared English speakers to members of the Tarahumara tribe of Northwest Mexico. The Tarahumara language falls into the Uto-Aztecan language family, a Native American language family spoken near the mountains of North America. And like most world languages, the Tarahumara language doesn’t distinguish blue from green.

The researchers discovered that, compared to the Tarahumara, English speakers do indeed see blue and green as more distinct. Having a word for blue seems to make the color ‘pop’ a little more in our minds. But it was a fragile effect, and any verbal distraction would make it disappear. The implication is that language may affect how we see the world. Somehow, the linguistic distinction between blue and green may heighten the perceived difference between them. Smells like Whorf’s idea to me.

That was 1984. What have we learnt since? In 2006, a study led by Aubrey Gilbert made a rather surprising discovery. Imagine that you’re a subject in their experiment. You’re asked to stare at the cross in the middle of the screen. A circle of colored tiles appear. One of the tiles is different from the others. Sometimes it will be on the left, and other times on the right. Your task is to spot whether the odd-color-out is on the left or on the right. Keep your eyes on the cross.

That’s easy enough. What’s the catch?

Well, sometimes you’ll also get a picture that looks like this.

See the difference? In one case, English speakers have different words for the two colors, blue and green. So there’s a concept that builds a wall between them. But in other cases like above, the two colors are conceptually the same.

Here’s what the researchers wanted to know. If you have a word to distinguish two colors, does that make you any better at telling them apart? More generally, does the linguistic baggage that we carry effect how we perceive the world? This study was designed to address Whorf’s idea head on.

As it happens, Whorf was right. Or rather, he was half right.

The researchers found that there is a real, measurable difference in how we perform on these two tasks. In general, it takes less time to identify that odd blue square compared to the odd green one.  This makes sense to anyone who’s ever tried looking for a tennis ball in the grass. It’s not that hard, but I’d rather the ball be blue. In once case you are jumping categories (blue versus green), and in the other, staying with a category (green versus green).

However, and this is where things start to get a bit strange, this result only holds if the differently colored square was in the right half of the circle. If it was in the left half (as in the example images above), then there’s no difference in reaction times – it takes just as long to spot the odd blue as the odd green.  It seems that color categories only matter in the right half of your visual field!

The graph above summarizes the results of this experiment. In red are the reaction times for making comparisons within a category (think green among greens). In yellow are comparisons where you straddle a category (think blue among greens). And what you see is that your performance on these two types of tasks differs in the right visual field (RVF), but not in the left visual field (LVF). It’s easier to tell apart colors with different names, but only if they are to your right. Keep in mind that this is a very subtle effect, the difference in reaction time is a few hundredths of a second.

So what’s causing this lopsidedness?  Well, if you know something about how the brain works, you might have already guessed. The crucial point is that everything that we see in the right half of our vision is processed in the left hemisphere of our brain, and everything we see in the left half is processed by the right hemisphere. And for most of us, the left brain is stronger at processing language. So perhaps the language savvy half of our brain is helping us out.

It’s not just English speakers that show this asymmetry. Koreans are familiar with the colors yeondu and chorok. An English speaker would call them both green (yeondu perhaps being a more yellowish green). But in Korean it’s not a matter of shade, they are both basic colors. There is no word for green that includes both yeondu and chorok.

And so imagine taking the same color ID test, but this time with yeondu and chorok instead of blue and green. A group of researchers ran this experiment. They discovered that among those who were the fastest at identifying the odd color, English speakers showed no left brain / right brain distinction, whereas Korean speakers did. It’s plausible that their left brain was attuned to the distinction between yeondu and chorok.

But how do we know that language is the key here? Back to the previous study. The researchers repeated the color circle experiment, but this time threw in a verbal distraction. The subjects were asked to memorize a word before each color test. The idea was to keep their language circuits distracted. And at the same time, other subjects were shown an image to memorize, not a word. In this case, it’s a visual distraction, and the language part of the brain needn’t be disturbed.

They found that when you’re verbally distracted, it suddenly becomes harder to separate blue from green (you’re slower at straddling color categories). In fact the results showed that people found this more difficult then separating two shades of green. However, if the distraction is visual, not verbal, things are different. It becomes easy to spot the blue among green, so you’re faster at straddling categories.

All of this is only true for your left brain. Meanwhile, your right brain is rather oblivious to these categories (until, of course, the left brain bothers to inform it). The conclusion is that language is somehow enhancing your left brain’s ability to discern different colors with different names. Cultural forces alter our perception in ever so subtle a way, by gently tugging our visual leanings in different directions. Whorf was right, but only when it comes to half your brain.

Imagine a world without color names. You lived in such a world once, when you were an infant. Do you remember what it was like? Anna Franklin is a psychologist who is particularly interested in where color categories come from. She studies color recognition in infants, as a window into how the brain organizes color.

Here she is discussing her work in this incredible clip from a BBC Horizon documentary called ‘Do you see what I see?‘. It’s 8 minutes long, but definitely worth it. It starts off with infants, and then cuts to the Himba tribe who have a highly unusual color naming system. You’ll see them taking the color wheel test, with very surprising results.

Surprisingly, many children take a remarkably long time to learn their color names. By the time they can name dozens of objects, they still struggle with basic colors. A two year old may know that a banana is yellow or an apple is red, but if you show them a blue cup, odds are even that they’ll call it red. And this confusion can persist even after encountering hundreds of examples, until as late as the age of four. There have been studies that show that very young sighted children are as likely to identify a color correctly as blind children of the same age. They rely on their experience, rather than recognize the color outright.

Even Charles Darwin, who had a tendency to think of his children as in-house experimental subjects, was alarmed with their slow progress in this domain*.

I attended carefully to the mental development of my young children, and with two, or as I believe three of them, soon after they had come to the age when they knew the names of all common objects, I was startled by observing that they seeed quite incapable of affixing the right names to the colours in coloured engravings, although I tried repeatedly to teach them. I distinctly remember declaring that they were colour-blind, but this afterwards proved a groundless fear. [..] Therefore the difficulty, which young children experience either in distinguishing, or more probably in naming colours, seems to deserve further attention.

He was on to something here. The big question is when children learn their color words, does their perception of the world change? Anna Franklin (who we met in the video above) and colleagues took on this question. Working with toddlers aged two to four, they split them into two groups. There were the namers, who could reliably distinguish blue from green, and the politely-named learners, who couldn’t. The researchers repeated the color circle experiment on these children. Rather than have them press a button (probably not a good idea), they tracked the infants’ eyes to see how long it took them to spot the odd square.

As toddlers learn the names of colors, a remarkable transformation is taking place inside their heads. Before they learn their color names, they are better at distinguishing color categories in their right brain (Left Visual Field). In a sense, their right brain understands the difference between blue and green, even before they have the words for it. But once they acquire words for blue and green, this ability jumps over to the left brain (Right Visual Field).

Think about what that means. As infant brains are rewiring themselves to absorb our visual language, the seat of categorical processing jumps hemispheres from the right brain to the left. And it stays here throughout adulthood. Their brains are furiously re-categorizing the world, until mysteriously, something finally clicks into place. So the next time you see a toddler struggling with their colors, don’t be like Darwin, and cut them some slack. They’re going through a lot.

Footnote:

*At times, it was probably not much fun to be one of Darwin’s children. He goes on to write:

I will add that it formerly appeared to me that the gustatory sense, at least in the case of my own infants, and very young children, differed from that of grown-up persons. This was shown by their not disliking rhubard mixed with a little sugar and milk, which is to us abominably nauseous; and in their strong taste for the sourest and most austere fruits, such as unripe gooseberries and crab apples.

References:

Regier, T., & Kay, P. (2009). Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13 (10), 439-446 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.07.001

Gilbert AL, Regier T, Kay P, & Ivry RB (2006). Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103 (2), 489-94 PMID: 16387848

Franklin A, Drivonikou GV, Clifford A, Kay P, Regier T, & Davies IR (2008). Lateralization of categorical perception of color changes with color term acquisition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105 (47), 18221-5 PMID: 19015521

A friend of mine recently pointed me towards an incredible resource. It’s called the Annual Status of Education Report (or ASER, which means impact in Hindi). ASER is an ambitious survey of the state of Indian rural education, conducted yearly since 2005, and their 2011 report came out a few days ago.

The level of organization here is truly impressive. It’s the largest survey conducted outside the government, combining the efforts of over 25,000 young volunteers from local organizations. Together, they survey nearly 300,000 households in over 16,000 villages in all states of India, and conduct basic level reading and numeracy tests on over 700,000 children.

Behind this coordinated effort is a simple and powerful idea, that effective policy needs to be based on evidence. The report takes a refreshingly no-nonsense approach. Rather than starting off with a long list of dignitaries to thank and lofty goals to implement, ASER gets right down to the point, with figures and tables. They focus on two basic goals. How many children are enrolled in schools (and what kind of school)? And are these children learning the very basics of reading and numeracy? By comparing trends of schooling and learning in different states, they have put together the most detailed picture so far of what’s working and what isn’t in rural education. The general picture that is emerging is one of rising enrollment but declining learning outcomes, from levels that were already low.

So let’s get down to the data. While reading through the report, some surprising facts and numbers jumped out at me.

More kids are going to school than ever before. Among 6 to 14 year olds in rural India, 97% are attending school. The toughest demographic to keep in school is 11 to 14 year-old girls, and even here the numbers are improving. Attendance in this age range has gone up from 90% to 95%. This is a remarkable achievement, and a necessary first step towards a right to education.

Over a quarter of these children are now enrolled in private schools. With the new Right to Education Act, government schools are now free and, according to the statistics, are performing better than rural private schools. Nonetheless, private school education is on the rise, suggesting that there is still not enough access to the government school network.

Teachers are attending school regularly. Their attendance is at 87% (on the day of the survey). Gujarat is doing particularly well with 96% of teachers attending, and ten states have greater than 90% teacher attendance. However, as these results are based on a single day of measurement, you should take them with a grain of salt.

But the students aren’t. Student attendance is at 71%, a number that has dropped in the last four years. Some states have dropped over 10 percent here. Bihar is at the bottom of the list here, with 50% student attendance.

A quarter of all students are attending school in a language they don’t speak at home.

Half of all rural schools do not have a functioning toilet. Nearly a quarter do not have separate girls toilets. A quarter do not have access to drinking water. Adequate drinking water and functioning, separate toilets for boys and girls are now a mandated requirement by the Right to Education Act that came into effect in 2010.

More than half of students in the fifth grade can’t read at second grade level. Similar statistics arise for basic math levels. The ability to read complete sentences or add and subtract numbers is not a very ambitious standard for learning, and Indian schools are failing to achieve even this.

What’s more, the math and reading levels are falling further. Learning outcomes have fallen over the last six years. Some states have dropped by over 10 percent in the last year alone.

What could be causing this drastic decline? The study points to certain problem areas. For one thing, the number of classrooms that cater to more than one grade level is on the rise. In some of the problem states, teacher and student attendance is also falling. Also, 2011 was the year the Indian census was conducted, which meant that teachers were pulled out of school to conduct surveys. Neither of these factors can individually be held responsible for the trend, but taken together they build a story of educational decline.

Take the case of Punjab and Haryana. These neighboring states share a capital, are matched in student and teacher attendance, in private school enrollment, and in numbers of classrooms that host students of multiple grades. Yet they are moving in opposite directions. Every year, the Punjab schooling system is becoming more effective in converting non-readers into readers, whereas the opposite is true in Haryana. The report argues that part of this difference may be explained by a three-year program taken on by Punjab to improve levels of reading and numeracy.

Similarly, consider the situation in Madhya Pradesh. It was improving in teaching effectiveness until 2008, after which learning levels took a precipitous fall. Some of this must have to do with the lower levels of student and teacher attendance, and a higher number of classrooms that cater to multiple grades. But what explains the initial rise? In 2005-2006, and again in 2007-2008, the state launched focused campaigns to improve reading and basic literacy, which could have had a positive impact.

The ASER findings highlight the failings of the current system, and they point towards areas where the central and state governments need to take action.

Perhaps the saddest picture emerges in a short article that summarizes the state of affairs, written by Lant Pritchett, a professor of International Development at Harvard Kennedy school. He imagines the trajectory of a young boy or girl who has just enrolled into school. What can the numbers tell us about the likely fate of this child? The numbers he presents are from the 2010 data, so I repeated the same calculation for the latest data. The following table summarizes the fate of this young child, in a nutshell (explained below).

This table tells a heart-breaking story. Here is how it works. The second column tells you the percentage of students who can read at second grade level. The next column shows the improvement in this number, for every year of schooling. This is the fraction of students who are learning to read in every grade (the gain from grade to grade). For example, by the end of the third grade, 10.1% more of the students can now read a basic text.

Using this data, you can then ask the following question. If you come into a grade not knowing how to read, what are the odds that you still won’t be able to read at the end of the year? This is the number presented in the last column [1]. It measures the failure of the schools to bring a child to literacy. The larger this number, the more likely it is that a child who is left behind will stay behind. For example, of the children who enter the fourth grade not knowing how to read, 81% will not gain literacy that year. 

Now imagine the plight of our hopeful student, who has just joined the second grade, without knowing how to read. It is pretty much a given that they will not learn how to read in the second grade (94% odds). In the third grade, 9 out of 10 students will not learn how to read. In the fourth grade, 8 out of 10. The Right to Education Act mandates that students should not repeat a year. So every year, this child is promoted onwards, with the hope that somebody else will notice and help. But year after year, the odds are stacked firmly against them. Lant Pritchett describes the outcome:

“The result is that you could easily be one of the one in three children who complete lower primary schooling, passed through five entire years of schooling, having spent roughly 5,000 hours in school, still lacking the most fundamental of skills. And so, year after year, a dream deferred becomes a dream denied.”

References:

ASER center, Pratham (2011). Annual Status of Education Report (Rural), 2011 Survey Results

You can query the ASER data from all years, and download the annual reports.

[1] The formula to calculate this is  100-((gain from previous grade)/(100-fraction that could read in previous grade))*100

Image Credit: Royd Tauro

I’m back at home in India, and visited my local toy store today, looking for a science kit for a wide-eyed young friend. A woman walks in, seeking a toy for a one-year-old child. “A boy, not a girl”, she hastens to add. The shopkeeper smiles, and says that at one year of age there isn’t really a difference. “I know”, replies the woman, “but I don’t want you to pick out a doll.”

This is a small example, but I find it sad how we impose these gender roles onto infants. You don’t need to be a sociologist to realize that much of one’s gender identity depends on society. If you ask an adolescent girl growing up in the United States what she wants to be when she grows up, her answer will be quite different from that of a girl in India or Afghanistan. Every society creates certain expectations for its children, and this affects the kinds of educational opportunities and careers they aspire towards. Crucially, study after study has shown that these ambitions really matter. What a child believes about their capabilities has a strong bearing on what they will actually achieve.

In the developing world, girls are routinely subject to lower expectations than boys. This bias creates an inequality in educational and societal opportunities. This raises an important question. Is it possible to reduce the gender gap in a society by changing the beliefs of individuals? A clever new study to be published in Science argues that in rural India, the answer is yes. The authors argue that the presence of a prominent female role model in an Indian village reduces the gender gap in that village.

Think for a moment about how you would test such a claim. Well, you’d have to randomly divide villages into two different groups. In the first set of villages, you make no change. In the second set, you put a woman in charge of each village. Then you wait and see how things change. It’s important that you choose the villages at random, because it ensures that there won’t be any other difference between the two groups. If you do see a difference develop, you can conclude that it must be caused by the change you made – in this case, the presence of a woman leader.

The insight by the authors was that India has already implemented such an experiment.

In 1993, India made a constitutional amendment to institute gender quotas nation-wide, for positions on village councils (gram panchayats). This has had a dramatic effect on the rural political landscape. In the eight years from 1992 to 2000, the number of women in rural village councils has risen more than eight-fold.

What’s more, in many Indian states, this quota was implemented in a randomized fashion. A third of the village councils are randomly chosen to be reserved for a female chief councilor (a Pradhan). Just the right conditions for our hypothetical experiment.

The researchers surveyed nearly 500 villages in a poor, rural district of West Bengal called Birbhum, about 200 km from Kolkata. The reservation system went into effect in West Bengal in 1998. Depending on how the dice fell, over the next decade villages in this district had either been reserved for a female Pradhan once, twice, or not at all. The researchers questioned both adults and adolescents (of ages 11-15), asking them questions about educational and career aspirations. In addition to measuring beliefs, they also looked at concrete results by conducting a math and reading test for 9 year old boys and girls enrolled in school.

Here is what they found. First, let’s look at villages without reservations. There is a real and measurable gender gap here. On average, daughters spend 79 minutes more per day on household chores than boys. Parents have higher educational aspirations for their sons. They are 10% less likely to want their female child to study beyond secondary school. This belief extends to the children, girls are less likely to want to graduate. Furthermore, this gap extends to actual educational outcomes. Girls are 6% less likely than boys to attend school, and 4% less likely to be able to read and write.

What about careers and ambitions? In these villages, three-quarters of parents believe that their daughters’ occupations should be decided by their in-laws, while not applying the same criteria to their sons.

Now, compare this to villages that have had two terms under a female Pradhan. Unsurpisingly, the parents’ aspirations for their sons remains unchanged. But things have changed for the daughters. Parents are now less likely to want their in-laws to decide their daughters occupation. These daughters are also spending less time per day on household chores. Their own beliefs about their abilities have changed. They are less likely to want to be a housewife and to want to marry after 18. They are more likely to want to graduate. They now prefer jobs that require an education.

What’s more, this change in beliefs also translates to a change in educational outcomes. After two terms under a female Pradhan, boys and girls are reading and writing at the same level. Across the board, from education and domestic life to career choices, the researchers find that the gender gap shrinks after female reservation. And it doesn’t end there. The researchers also found that post-reservation, villages are far more likely to elect a female leader. This simple policy change has far reaching consequences.

What could be causing this change? The authors argue that people’s beliefs about womens’ capabilities change after being exposed to a strong, positive female role model. But that’s not the only possibility. It could also be that these women leaders are instituting policies that specifically help women succeed, such as investing more in female schooling. The authors don’t think that this is happening. To rule out this explanation, they repeated their study for a slightly older age group, from ages 16 to 30. For these young adults, they could find no evidence that the gender gap was any smaller in reserved villages, suggesting that this is a bona fide role model effect.

This study is particularly important in the Indian political and social climate, where gender discrimination is rampant. In 2010, the upper house of the Indian Parliament passed a bill that proposes to reserve one-third of all seats in the lower house and state legislature for women. The bill, a constitutional amendment, has faced widespread backlash and remains stalled in the lower house.

There is a lesson here for those who oppose political reservation for women. And that is this, political reservations are not just about power. It is also about creating role models, and opening up opportunities that are previously inaccessible. This study shows that in rural India, gender reservation leads to a real, measurable impact in reducing educational and social inequality.

References

Beaman, L., Duflo, E., Pande, R., & Topalova, P. (2012). Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls: A Policy Experiment in India Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1212382

Image credits: Basoo!