Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Universita' di Roma, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 May 1;109(18):6819-24. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1113347109. Epub 2012 Apr 16.
One of the fundamental problems in cognitive science is how humans categorize the visible color spectrum. The empirical evidence of the existence of universal or recurrent patterns in color naming across cultures is paralleled by the observation that color names begin to be used by individual cultures in a relatively fixed order. The origin of this hierarchy is largely unexplained. Here we resort to multiagent simulations, where a population of individuals, subject to a simple perceptual constraint shared by all humans, namely the human Just Noticeable Difference, categorizes and names colors through a purely cultural negotiation in the form of language games. We found that the time needed for a population to reach consensus on a color name depends on the region of the visible color spectrum. If color spectrum regions are ranked according to this criterion, a hierarchy with [red, (magenta)-red], [violet], [green/yellow], [blue], [orange], and [cyan], appearing in this order, is recovered, featuring an excellent quantitative agreement with the empirical observations of the WCS. Our results demonstrate a clear possible route to the emergence of hierarchical color categories, confirming that the theoretical modeling in this area has now attained the required maturity to make significant contributions to the ongoing debates concerning language universals.
人类如何对可见光谱进行分类，这是认知科学中的一个基本问题。跨文化的颜色命名存在普遍或重复模式的经验证据与以下观察结果相吻合：颜色名称开始在各个文化中以相对固定的顺序使用。这种层次结构的起源在很大程度上尚未得到解释。在这里，我们诉诸于多主体模拟，其中一群人受到所有人共有的简单感知约束，即人类的可察觉差异，通过语言游戏的纯文化协商对颜色进行分类和命名。我们发现，群体就颜色名称达成共识所需的时间取决于可见光谱区域。如果根据这个标准对颜色光谱区域进行排序，则可以恢复一个具有 [红色，（品红色）-红色]、[紫色]、[绿色/黄色]、[蓝色]、[橙色] 和 [青色] 的层次结构，与 WCS 的经验观察结果具有极好的定量一致性。我们的结果表明，分层颜色类别出现的一种明确的可能途径，证实了该领域的理论建模现在已经达到了必要的成熟度，可以为正在进行的关于语言普遍性的辩论做出重大贡献。
