Cross-species Assessment of the Linguistic Origins of Color Categories.

Abstract

This article considers the relation between language and categorical perception (CP) of color. Two opposite theories are reviewed, the universalist position arguing that categories are universal with an essentially biological origin, and the relativist position that holds that color categories are essentially arbitrary and derive from color terms of the speaker's language. A review of the human literature presents developmental, neuropsychological, cross-cultural, neuro-imaging and computer simulation evidence that CP of colors has at least partly linguistic origins. As animal studies also contribute to this debate, we then review evidence of CP in the visual and auditory domains, and pinpoint the inconsistencies of the literature. To make a direct comparison between humans and monkeys, experimental studies compared humans and baboons for their color thresholds and in a recognition memory task designed to assess CP of colors. Only humans showed better betweencategory than within-category discrimination performance, suggesting species differences in the processing of a color continuum. That study along with some of our previous research supports the theory of a linguistic origin for color categories in humans.

College students’ categorical perceptions of grades: it’s simply ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’

“…Furthermore, this finding is consistent with other investigations of categorical perception (e.g. language, colour vision) which demonstrate the role of experience in the development of fine tuning for within-category discriminations (Harnad 1987; see also Davidoff and Fagot 2010). College students typically have a history with alphabetic grades throughout early education, while their experiences with numeric equivalents are probably more limited (i.e.…”

Red is the new orange: Nonlinguistic categorical color perception

“…Caves and coauthors (2018) were not the first to ask whether categorical color perception may be present in a nonhuman species. However, prior research with baboons (Davidoff & Fagot, 2010) failed to find evidence of categorical perception. Notably, baboons in this earlier study were trained to discriminate colors around blue-purple boundary that, to my knowledge, has no particular evolutionary significance to baboons.…”

“…Bgreen^(yeondu, or yellow-green, and chorok, or green) find these two colors to be more dissimilar than do English speakers (reviewed by Davidoff & Fagot, 2010). Although the extent to which language affects color categorization remains a matter of debate, it is generally accepted that linguistic labels have a unique and profound effect on our perception and categorization of colors (e.g., Grandison et al, 2016).…”

Colormesh: A novel method for quantifying variation in complex color patterns

“…In color segmentation approaches, color categories require user determined thresholds which introduces a potentially problematic level of human subjectivity (Davidoff andFagot 2010, Siuda-Krzywicka et al 2019; but see Bergeron and Fuller 2018). Reflectance spectrometry is an objective measure of color that measures the wavelengths and intensities of light reflected from a small point sample over a continuous range of wavelengths (Endler 1990, Zuk and Decruyenaere 1994, Andersson et al 1998, Gomez and Théry 2007.…”