Researchers explain why we can’t remember exact colours

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have difficulty remembering specific shades because the brain has a tendency to store color information based on basic hues.
Led by Jonathan Flombaum, the researchers were able to counter standard assumptions regarding memory, showing for the first time that people’s color memories are guided by biases favoring “best” versions of basic colors over the actual colors seen in a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
For example, ultramarine, cobalt, navy and azure are all hues but the brain stores them as simply “blue” in the memory. The brain’s tendency of categorizing colors thus leads to people more accurately remembering colors if what they saw is a good example of a certain category.
For the study, the researchers tasked subjects with looking at a color with 180 different hues and finding the “best” examples of yellow, orange, purple, green, pink and blue they can find. With a different group of subjects, the researchers conducted a memory experiment where participants viewed a colored square for a tenth of a second and were asked to identify the color they saw from the color wheel.
When matching hues, both groups of subjects had the tendency of choosing “best” colors as the basic hues representative of a color. However, the bias was more evident with the second group tasked with identifying hues they were shown for just a tenth of a second.