Effect of Color Terms on Color Perception

Definition The possibility that naming colors, either in a single instance or habitually over a lifetime, alters. color perception Color perception and color communication When we communicate about the colors of scenes and objects comprising our visual experience, what we see informs our choice of words. A question that has interested many cognitive psychologists is whether the color words we use affect how we see. One view is that naming is for communication and has no effect on how we see or experience the world. In this view, color appearance, and therefore performance on tasks which strictly depend on color appearance, is determined entirely by the visual system and not at all by the language that one speaks. Color vision is informationally encapsulated, its output is automatically produced, and while its output is available for like decision cognitive processes making and speaking, higher cognitive processes cannot alter its process (1). This can be contrasted with the idea that the very act of naming a color, either in a single instance or habitually over a lifetime, can change one's perceptual experience with the result that colors assigned the same label (that is, belonging to the same color category) are more similar than colors assigned different labels (belonging to different color categories). The two views have persisted in the psychology literature for at least two reasons. First, the empirical evidence has been mixed, with some researchers finding effects of color terms on perceptual or cognitive tasks, and others failing to find such effects. Second, when has been found, it has often been unclear at what level the effects are positive evidence manifested. For example, the same experimental results might be interpreted by some researchers as evidence that color terms affect how one sees colors and by other researchers as evidence that color terms affect how one remembers or makes judgments about colors. In this entry, we examine the question of how to to probe the effects design experiments of color terms on color perception and cognition and how to interpret the effects. The study of categorical effects in color perception has its roots in two historical traditions. One is a concept that originated in anthropology, called the (2). Whorf and Sapir formulated this hypothesis in different Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis ways in their writing, but researchers have generally taken their view to be something like the way in which experiences are mapped onto words …