Biological components of colour preference in infancy

Abstract

Adult colour preference has been summarized quantitatively in terms of weights on the two fundamental neural processes that underlie early colour encoding: the S-(L+M) ('blue-yellow') and L-M ('red-green') cone-opponent contrast channels (Ling, Hurlbert & Robinson, 2006; Hurlbert & Ling, 2007). Here, we investigate whether colour preference in 4-5-month-olds may be analysed in the same way. We recorded infants' eye-movements in response to pairwise presentations of eight colour stimuli varying only in hue. Infants looked longest at reddish and shortest at greenish hues. Analyses revealed that the L-M and S-(L+M) contrast between stimulus colour and background explained around half of the variation in infant preference across the hue spectrum. Unlike adult colour preference patterns, there was no evidence for sex differences in the weights on either of the cone-opponent contrast components. The findings provide a quantitative model of infant colour preference that summarizes variation in infant preference across hues.

Color preferences in infants and adults are different

“…For both light and dark colors, the highest and lowest preferences were significantly different from chance. This finding might explain the differences among previous infant studies (Adams, 1987;Bornstein, 1975;Franklin et al, 2010;Franklin et al, 2008;Teller et al, 2004;Zemach et al, 2007), because the lightnesses (and saturations) of colors were different in each study.…”

“…However, EVT also proposes that an innate, adaptive function of color preferences could draw us toward objects that are evolutionarily beneficial (e.g., clean water), and away from those that are not (e.g., rotten food). Previous research on infant color preferences has been consistent with the innateness hypothesis, in that young infants preferentially look most at blue and least at yellow-green or yellow (e.g., Adams, 1987;Bornstein, 1975;Franklin, Bevis, Ling, & Hurlbert, 2010;Franklin et al, 2008;Teller, Civan, & Bronson-Castain, 2004;Zemach, Chang, & Teller, 2007). The similarity between infant hue preference curves in these studies and those in their adult study led Palmer and Schloss (2010) to suggest that at least some aspects of adult color preference may be innate.…”

“…For example, several results have indicated a strong looking preference for red in young infants (Adams, 1987;Bornstein, 1975;Franklin et al, 2010), whereas others have found a relatively reduced preference for red (Teller et al, 2004;Zemach et al, 2007). Such differences could well be due to differences in the lightness (and/or saturation) of the reds across studies.…”

“…In Experiment 1, we assessed color preferences in 4-to 6-month-old infants by measuring looking times with an eyetracker (e.g., Franklin et al, 2010) for all possible pairs of eight colors: Dark and light versions of red, yellow, green, and blue. If we were to find an interaction between hue and lightness, it could explain the inconsistent results from previous infant studies.…”

Ecological influences on individual differences in color preference

“…Hurlbert and Ling suggested that women weight more positively on the L-M axis, due to their early roles as gatherers in hunter-gatherer societies (e.g., needing to find red berries against green leaves). This sex difference in weightings on the L-M axis was not corroborated in other cultures, however (Taylor, Clifford, & Franklin, 2013;Yokosawa, Schloss, Asano, & Palmer, 2015) or in infants (Franklin, Bevis, Ling, & Hurlbert, 2009), which challenges the gender-based evolutionary account for different weightings across individuals. How and why individual differences in color preferences arise, therefore, remain open questions.…”