‘Blue for creativity, red for attention’

What colour most improves brain performance and receptivity to advertising, red or blue? This has been a subject of debate for long. Now, a new study says that both can — it depends on the nature of the message.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have found while red is the most effective at enhancing a person’s attention to detail, blue is best at boosting their ability to think creatively.

‘Previous research linked blue and red to enhanced cognitive performance, but disagreed on which provides the greatest boost. It really depends on the nature of the task,’ lead researcher Juliet Zhu said.

For their study, the researchers tracked more than 600 participants’ performance on six cognitive tasks that required either detail-orientation or creativity. Most experiments were conducted on computers with a screen — red, blue or white.

Red boosted performance on detail-oriented tasks such as memory retrieval and proofreading by as much as 31 per cent compared to blue; conversely for creative task, brainstorming, blue environmental cues prompted participants to produce twice as many creative outputs as when under the red condition.

‘These variances are caused by different unconscious motivations that red and blue activate,’ said Zhu, also noting that colour influences cognition and behaviour through learned associations.

‘Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution. The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer,’ Zhu said.

Conversely, blue encourages people to think outside the box and be creative, said Zhu. ‘Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquility The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory.’

PTI