An Ecological Account of Individual Differences in Color Preferences

Toward an account of individual differences in drug abuse.

What is drug addiction? It is drug taking on the part of the individual that is usually excessive, harmful to the individual or his/her social environment, and which therefore presents a significant public health problem. The chapters in this technical review deal with the variety of issues of why drug addiction affects only some of us. As documented in these chapters, many of us are exposed on...

An Ecological Valence Theory of Human Color Preferences

Although color preference is an important aspect of human behavior, little is known about why people like some colors more than others. In this paper we probe this issue both theoretically and empirically. First, we discuss Hurlbert and Ling’s (2007) cone-contrast theory, which posits a physiological explanation based on opponent cone outputs and gender differences. We then present an ecologica...

Individual Differences in Color Vision

Causes of between-individual differences in mating preferences

Many species show substantial between-individual variation in mating preferences, but studying the causes of such variation remains a challenge. For example, the relative importance of heritable variation versus shared early-environmental effects (like sexual imprinting) on mating preferences has never been quantified in a population of animals. Here, we estimate the heritability of and early-r...

The Importance of Individual Differences in Grapheme-Color Synesthesia

In this issue of Neuron, Hubbard et al. show individual differences in how grapheme-color synesthetes perform on cognitive tasks. Importantly, these behavioral differences were correlated with fMRI measures. Such individual differences have important ramifications for synesthesia research. If individual differences are ignored, then synesthesia research will be characterized by erroneous conclu...