Sixty‐eight 2‐ to 12‐year‐olds and 30 adults were shown colorful displays on a touchscreen monitor and trained to point to the location of a named color. Participants located targets near‐perfectly when presented with four abutting colored patches. When presented with three colored patches on a colored background, toddlers failed to locate targets in the background. Eye tracking demonstrated that the effect was partially mediated by a tendency not to fixate the background. However, the effect was abolished when the targets were named as nouns, whilst the change to nouns had little impact on eye movement patterns. Our results imply a powerful, inbuilt tendency to attend to objects, which may slow the development of color concepts and acquisition of color words. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/TKO1BPeAiOI. [Correction added on 27 January 2017, after first online publication: The video abstract link was added.] When asked to point to “blue” in the pictures above, two‐ to four‐year olds have no problems pointing to the blue bubbles on the left. But they often struggle to find any blue in the picture on the right, even though the blue water makes up most of the scene! When prompted with nouns, they find “bubbles” or “water” equally easily, demonstrating children's inbuilt bias to attend to “things” rather than to abstract concepts like colour.