Garside Daniel J, Chang Audrey L Y, Selwyn Hannah M, Conway Bevil R
Section on Perception, Cognition, Action, Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD 20892.
National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD 20892.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Jan 7;122(1):e2400273121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2400273121. Epub 2024 Dec 30.
To what extent does concept formation require language? Here, we exploit color to address this question and ask whether macaque monkeys have color concepts evident as categories. Macaques have similar cone photoreceptors and central visual circuits to humans, yet they lack language. Whether Old World monkeys such as macaques have consensus color categories is unresolved, but if they do, then language cannot be required. If macaques do not have color categories, then color categories in humans are unlikely to derive from innate properties of visual encoding and likely to depend on cognitive abilities such as language that differ between monkeys and humans. We tested macaques by adapting a match-to-sample paradigm used in humans to uncover color categories from errors in matches, and we analyzed the data using computational simulations that assess the possibility of unrecognized distortions in the perceptual uniformity of color space. The results provide evidence that humans have consensus cognitive color categories and macaques do not. One animal showed evidence for a private color category, demonstrating that monkeys have the capacity to form color categories even if they do not form consensus color categories. Taken together, the results imply that consensus color categories in humans, for which there is ample evidence, must depend upon language or other cognitive abilities.
概念形成在多大程度上需要语言？在此，我们利用颜色来解决这个问题，并探究猕猴是否具有作为类别而明显存在的颜色概念。猕猴具有与人类相似的视锥光感受器和中枢视觉回路，但它们没有语言。像猕猴这样的旧世界猴是否具有一致的颜色类别尚无定论，但如果它们有，那么语言就不是必需的。如果猕猴没有颜色类别，那么人类的颜色类别不太可能源自视觉编码的固有属性，而可能取决于猴子和人类之间不同的认知能力，比如语言。我们通过采用人类使用的样本匹配范式来测试猕猴，以便从匹配错误中发现颜色类别，并且我们使用计算模拟来分析数据，这些模拟评估了颜色空间感知均匀性中未被识别的失真可能性。结果提供了证据，表明人类具有一致的认知颜色类别而猕猴没有。有一只动物表现出存在一个私人颜色类别的证据，这表明猴子即使没有形成一致的颜色类别，也有形成颜色类别的能力。综合来看，这些结果意味着，有充分证据表明人类存在的一致颜色类别必定依赖于语言或其他认知能力。
