Color perception is a subject that's fascinated me for a long time. Humans are visually rather unique, as unlike most other mammals we are able to see beyond yellow into the orange and red spectral range.

That's probably attributable to trichromacy, having three classes of retinal cones. The article points this out and correctly notes the complexity of visual circuitry without giving much detail. That's OK, the layers involved in translating retinal impulses, the exquisitely intricate slicing and dicing visual information into encodings for shape, motion, texture, surface, depth as well as color are truly mind-boggling.

That suggests to me that trying to ascertain linguistic influences on the visual system may be a form of "premature optimization". Of course it will be no surprise to find out there are cultural effects on verbal color description and communication conventions. OTOH it's also plausible to suppose that humans of various cultures can distinguish colors equally well when color naming is not demanded.

Artists who care about color don't care about the names colors are called by. What is important is being able to distinguish subtly different colors in order to be able to produce results. On the web #ff8844 doesn't have to have a name, it does the same thing anyway.

At the end of the day it's important to determine if language really changes what we see, or only the modes of communication, styles, fashions and all the layers piled on top of actual sensory experience.

Perhaps in everyday activity who cares if a shade is "orange" vs. "tangerine". When fine color discrimination really counts, in art, engineering, medicine, color names are secondary if necessary at all.

BTW if anyone wants to informally test their own color discrimination ability, I'd recommend looking here: http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge