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“Categorical Perception” and Linguistic Categorization of Color

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Abstract

This paper offers a conceptual clarification of the phenomenon commonly referred to as categorical perception of color, both in adults and in infants. First, I argue against the common notion of categorical perception as involving a distortion of the perceptual color space. The effects observed in the categorical perception research concern categorical discrimination performance and the underlying processing; they need not directly reflect the relations of color similarity and difference. Moreover, the methodology of the research actually presupposes that the relations of similarity and difference do not vary with languages. The observed categorical perception effects should be conceived independently of the perceptual color space. Second, I challenge the usual opinion that the existing evidence on infant “categorical perception” allows us to conclude that infants perceptually categorize color, and in particular, that they have perceptual categories that resemble the basic color categories of English. Such conclusions rest on an unjustified interpretation of the infant “categorical perception” findings in terms of adult linguistic categorical boundaries. Based on the suggested new understanding, I propose that the phenomenon, as present in infants, should be conceived and examined as a possible explanatory factor with respect to the existing patterns of color naming in languages of the world.

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Notes

  1. In the present paper I keep to the standard use of the latter term, following the usual definition.

  2. Cf. Fairchild (2005). To be explicit about the ontological status of color spaces: I take the ideal perceptual color space to be an abstraction over the relations of identity, similarity and difference between particular colors, rather than an independent psychological reality by which such relations could be explained. The artificial color spaces are approximations of the ideal color space conceived in this way, imperfectly capturing the similarities perceived by a normal observer. While these spaces are three-dimensional and Euclidean, it is by no means evident that the ideal perceptual color space, or one that were to capture the similarity relations exhaustively, could actually preserve these characteristics; cf. Saunders and van Brakel (1997), and Kuehni (2002).

  3. Davidoff et al. (2012) distinguish “perceptual similarity” and “categorical similarity” as two modes of judging similarity of colors, the latter being “default” and manifested in “implicit judgment tasks” such as the visual search task. That seems rather confused, since the authors completely ignore the fact that the visual search task involves no similarity judgment at all, and they present this task in line with matching-to-sample tasks where similarity judgments are more or less explicitly required (and, not surprisingly, found).

  4. We need not discuss in detail the techniques of the earlier research on infant color categorization (that is, the habituation and the novelty-preference paradigm; Bornstein et al. 1976; Franklin and Davies 2004), since it is even less clear to what extent the results reflect color similarity relations, as opposed to effects of memory and color preference.

  5. In the CP context, see the findings to the same effect in Witzel and Gegenfurtner (2013) and Roberson et al. (2009).

  6. Here, I fully adopt the somewhat non-trivial assumption made in all existing research on infant categorical perception, that the perceptual color space and its approximations in the artificial color spaces are reasonably valid even for infants as young as 4 months.

  7. I believe that the possible impression that there are such good reasons is false. In Ocelák (2013), I reject the opinion that justification for the prelinguistic salience of red, yellow, green and blue (the alleged four “unique hues”) can be drawn from the neurophysiology of color or from language independent color phenomenology. On the side of psychology, Eleanor Rosch’s influential notion of prelinguistically available, universal color categories has been severely undermined by the cross-cultural research of Debi Roberson and colleagues (Roberson et al. 2000, 2005).

  8. The conclusion of Davidoff et al. (2009) is similar, but based on contradicting experimental results, rather than on a general objection as the above.

  9. As attested in Franklin et al. (2008c).

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Acknowledgments

This paper draws on chapter 6 of the thesis Ocelák (2013), defended at the University of Amsterdam and supervised by Martin Stokhof. Valuable comments on previous versions were provided by him, by Lieven Decock, and by two anonymous reviewers. Any remaining faults are solely my responsibility. The study gained support from the project GA UK 330214 “Color and Meaning” at Charles University as well as from the Programme for the Development of Fields of Study at Charles University, No. P13 Rationality in human sciences, sub-programme Knowledge and Normativity.

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  1. Institute of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Charles University in Prague (Faculty of Arts), nám. Jana Palacha 2, 116 38, Praha 1, Czech Republic

    Radek Ocelák

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Ocelák, R. “Categorical Perception” and Linguistic Categorization of Color. Rev.Phil.Psych. 7, 55–70 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0237-4

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