School of Cognitive Sciences, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, 19568364 Tehran, Iran;
National Institute of Mental Health, NIH, Bethesda, MD 20892
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Dec 8;117(49):31046-31052. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2001946117. Epub 2020 Nov 23.
The potential interaction between color naming and psychophysical color recognition has been historically debated. To study this interaction, here we utilized two approaches based on individual differences in color naming and variation of color name density along the color wheel. We tested a pool of Persian speaking subjects with a simple color matching task under two conditions: perceptual and memory-based matching. We also asked subjects to freely name 100 evenly sampled hues along the color wheel. We found that, individuals who possess more names to describe the color wheel have a strong edge in color memorization over those with fewer names. Nevertheless, having more or fewer color names was not related to the subjects' performance in perceptual color matching. We also calculated the density of color names along the color wheel and observed that parts of the color wheel with higher density of color names are held in memory more accurately. However, similar to the case of individual differences, the density of color names along the wheel did not show any correlation with perceptual color matching performance. Our results demonstrate a strong link between color naming and color memorization both across different individuals and different parts of the color wheel. These results also show that low-level perceptual color matching is not related to color naming, suggesting that the variation in color naming-among the individuals and across the color wheel-is neither the cause nor the effect of variation in low-level color perception.
颜色命名与心理物理颜色识别之间的潜在相互作用在历史上一直存在争议。为了研究这种相互作用，我们在这里采用了两种方法，分别基于颜色命名的个体差异和颜色名称密度沿色轮的变化。我们用一个简单的颜色匹配任务测试了一组说波斯语的受试者，该任务在两种条件下进行：基于感知的匹配和基于记忆的匹配。我们还要求受试者自由命名色轮上 100 个均匀采样的色调。我们发现，与那些颜色名称较少的人相比，拥有更多描述色轮颜色名称的人在颜色记忆方面具有更强的优势。然而，拥有更多或更少的颜色名称与受试者在感知颜色匹配方面的表现无关。我们还计算了色轮上颜色名称的密度，并观察到色轮上颜色名称密度较高的部分被更准确地记忆。然而，与个体差异的情况类似，轮上颜色名称的密度与感知颜色匹配性能之间没有任何相关性。我们的结果表明，颜色命名和颜色记忆之间存在很强的联系，无论是在不同个体之间还是在色轮的不同部分之间。这些结果还表明，低水平的感知颜色匹配与颜色命名无关，这表明颜色命名的变化——在个体之间和整个色轮上——既不是低水平颜色感知变化的原因，也不是其结果。
