Well, these are the findings of a new University of British Columbia study, which was aimed at determining which of the two colours most improves the brain’s performance and receptivity to advertising.

The study showed that both colours could improve the brain’s performance and receptivity to ads, depending upon the nature of the task or message.

Those behind the study say that advertisers and interior designers may find their findings interesting.

"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," says Juliet Zhu of UBC’s Sauder School of Business, author of the study which will appear in the journal Science Express.

For their study, the researchers tracked over 600 participants’ performance on six cognitive tasks between 2007 and 2008, which required either detail-orientation or creativity.

The team revealed that most of the experiments were conducted on computers, with a screen that was red, blue or white.

The researchers noted that red colour boosted the participants’ performance on detail-oriented tasks, such as memory retrieval and proofreading, by as much as 31 per cent compared to blue.

Conversely, according to them, for creative tasks such as brainstorming, blue environmental cues prompted participants to produce twice as many creative outputs as when under the red colour condition.

Zhu says that the variances were caused by different unconscious motivations that red and blue activate, noting that colour influences cognition and behaviour through learned associations.

The researcher revealed that a series of fictional ads and product packages were used to during the study, with a view to exploring how colour impacts receptivity to consumer packaging and advertising.

The study showed that when the background colour was red, people formed more favourable evaluations of products when its ad featured specific product details as opposed to evocative, creative messaging.

However, when the background was blue, the opposite pattern of results emerged.