Beyond the Colour Wheel: Shah Moore and the Irene Brown Bursary

Beyond the Colour Wheel

Shah Moore (2018, Psychology) is this year’s recipient of the British Neuropsychological Society’s Undergraduate Project Prize 2021. Shah received the award for ground-breaking research into the experience of colour and spatial categories among blind and sighted subjects, and was the recipient of a 2019 Irene Brown Bursary from Somerville College to slow the progression of their visual impairment.

The spatial prepositions experiment was an impressive, major contribution, combining complex quantitative and qualitative approaches.”

JUDGING COMMITTEE OF THE BRITISH NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY

It’s an idea most of us accept without question: the relationship between concepts is derived from our experiences. But what if you have never had a certain experience? What if you’re a blind or partially-sighted person trying to understand concepts that can can only be experienced through vision, such as the relationship between colours, or objects in space? These are the questions which Shah Moore, working with their supervisor, Kate Watkins, sought to answer in a final year research project conducted at the height of the pandemic. The study took as its starting point the desire to resolve contradictions in the findings of previous research. Some studies suggested that the blind conceptualise colour in both dimensions as per the Newtonian colour wheel, i.e. warm vs. cold and bright vs. dark. However, other studies found that blind colour spaces were unidimensional. In addition to this question, Shah also wanted to explore how blind vs. sighted groups represent spatial prepositions, such as above, below around and between, given that blind individuals rely on touch and audition alone in guiding object positioning. Through a combination of pair dissimilarity tasks, plotted maps of concept relationships and questionnaires, the study confirmed that two dimensions was the best fit model for all participants for both colour and spatial experiments. This conclusion has significant ramifications, because it suggests that humans can establish detailed conceptual knowledge with limited direct experience; language, sensory comparison and metaphor alone are enough to convey the relationships between colours and spatial relations. Speaking of the prize, Shah commented: ‘It is a huge honour for our project to be recognised by the BNS. As someone born with a severe visual impairment, I was thrilled to be able to give something back to the blind and visually-impaired community - and I am so grateful to Somerville College for supporting me throughout this project.’ The Irene Brown Bursary is awarded to students experiencing financial hardship.