“Our color vision is very strange,” says James Higham, an assistant professor in NYU’s Department of Anthropology and one of the study’s co-authors. “Our green receptor and our red receptor detect very similar colors. One would think that the ideal type of color vision would look different from ours, and when we design color detection, such as for digital cameras, we construct a different type of color vision. However, we’ve now shown that when it comes to spotting changes in color linked to social cues, humans outshine the type of color vision we’ve designed for our technologies.”