Color inference in visual communication: the meaning of colors in recycling

Abstract

People interpret abstract meanings from colors, which makes color a useful perceptual feature for visual communication. This process is complicated, however, because there is seldom a one-to-one correspondence between colors and meanings. One color can be associated with many different concepts (one-to-many mapping) and many colors can be associated with the same concept (many-to-one mapping). We propose that to interpret color-coding systems, people perform assignment inference to determine how colors map onto concepts. We studied assignment inference in the domain of recycling. Participants saw images of colored but unlabeled bins and were asked to indicate which bins they would use to discard different kinds of recyclables and trash. In Experiment 1, we tested two hypotheses for how people perform assignment inference. The local assignment hypothesis predicts that people simply match objects with their most strongly associated color. The global assignment hypothesis predicts that people also account for the association strengths between all other objects and colors within the scope of the color-coding system. Participants discarded objects in bins that optimized the color-object associations of the entire set, which is consistent with the global assignment hypothesis. This sometimes resulted in discarding objects in bins whose colors were weakly associated with the object, even when there was a stronger associated option available. In Experiment 2, we tested different methods for encoding color-coding systems and found that people were better at assignment inference when color sets simultaneously maximized the association strength between assigned color-object parings while minimizing associations between unassigned pairings. Our study provides an approach for designing intuitive color-coding systems that facilitate communication through visual media such as graphs, maps, signs, and artifacts.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s41235-018-0090-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Estimating Color-Concept Associations from Image Statistics

“…First, cognitive representations of color have strong categorical structure [5,38,52], which naturally maps to categories of data [8,15]. Second, people have rich semantic associations with colors called color-concept associations (e.g., a particular red associated with strawberries, roses, and anger) [17,30,33], which they use to interpret meanings of colors in visualizations [22,23,40,41,43]. Indeed, it is easier to interpret visualizations if semantic encoding between colors and concepts (referred to as color-concept assignments) match people's expectations derived from their color-concept associations [23,40,41].…”

“…Recent research has investigated how to optimize color palette design to produce color-concept assignments that are easy to interpret [23,41,43]. Methods typically involve quantifying associations between each color and concept of interest, and then using those data to calculate optimal color-concept assignments for the visualization [4,23,41,43]. It may seem that the best approach would be to assign concepts to their most strongly associated colors, but that is not always the case.…”

“…It may seem that the best approach would be to assign concepts to their most strongly associated colors, but that is not always the case. Sometimes, it is better to assign concepts to weakly associated colors to avoid confusions that can arise when multiple concepts are associated with similar colors (see Section 2.2) [41]. Thus, to leverage these optimization methods for visualization design, it is necessary to have an effective and efficient way to quantify human color-concept associations over a large range of colors.…”

Promoting effects of color‐text congruence in banner advertising

“…A recent research has found that color‐concept consistency is a useful perceptual feature in visual communication. Participants would benefit from the color of bins in an object‐discarding task if the colors and objects are strongly associated . As for text, sentences are easier to be remembered when the perceptual organization is consistent with the conceptual structure .…”

“…Participants would benefit from the color of bins in an object-discarding task if the colors and objects are strongly associated. 10 As for text, sentences are easier to be remembered when the perceptual organization is consistent with the conceptual structure. 11 It is still unclear whether color-text congruity would have similar effects in advertising domains, but Stroop's effect shows that participants are faster at reading a color word when displayed in a congruent text color than in an incongruent color.…”