Red for romance, blue for memory

Abstract

Decades of psychological research have shown that the color could affect human's emotion and perception. However, the influence of this effect on human performance is still unknown. This study was performed to investigate and reveal the effect of the color red, blue and gray on memory through a word recognition task. When the presented video clip featured a red background, the model's attractiveness was rated statistically higher than the other condition. The blue condition video viewers and their resulting performance on the word recognition task were better than the performances of the other color condition groups. This research implicates that a specific color has an effect on human perception and memory. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.