Abstract
Roberson and Davidoff (2000) found that colorcategorical perception (CP; better cross-category than within-category discrimination) was eliminated by verbal, but not by visual, interference presented during the interstimulus interval (ISI) of a discrimination task. On the basis of this finding, Roberson and Davidoff concluded that CP was mediated by verbal labels, and not by perceptual mechanisms, as is generally assumed. Experiment 1 replicated their results. However, it was found that if the interference type was uncertain on each trial (Experiment 2), CP then survived verbal interference. Moreover, it was found that the target color name could be retained across the ISI even with verbal interference (Experiment 3). We therefore conclude that color CP may indeed involve verbal labeling but that verbal interference does not necessarily prevent it.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Ahissar, M., &Hochstein, S. (1997). Attentional control of early perceptual learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,90, 5718–5722.
Baddeley, A. D. (1986).Working memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baddeley, A. D., &Hitch, G. J. (1974). Working memory. In G. H. Bower (Ed.),The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 8, pp. 47–87). London: Academic Press.
Bartlett, F. C. (1932).Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bornstein, M. H. (1974). Perceptual generalization: A note on the peak shift.Psychological Bulletin,81, 804–808.
Bornstein, M. H. (1976). Name codes and color memory.American Journal of Psychology,89, 269–279.
Bornstein, M. H. (1987). Perceptual categories in vision and audition. In S. Harnad (Ed.),Categorical perception: The groundwork of cognition (pp. 287–300). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bornstein, M. H., Kessen, W., &Weiskopf, S. (1976). Color vision and hue categorization in young infants.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,2, 115–129.
Bornstein, M. H., &Korda, N. O. (1984). Discrimination and matching within and between hues measured by reaction times: Some implications for categorical perception and levels of information processing.Psychological Research,46, 207–222.
Bornstein, M. H., &Monroe, M. D. (1980). Chromatic information processing: Rate depends on stimulus location in the category and psychological complexity.Psychological Research,42, 213–225.
Boynton, R. M., Fargo, L., Olson, C. X., &Smallman, H. S. (1989). Category effects in color memory.Color Research & Application,12, 107–123.
Brown, G. (1987). Phonological coding in rhyming and homophony judgement.Acta Psychologica,65, 247–262.
Calder, A. J., Young, A. W., Perrett, D. I., Etcoff, N. L., &Rowland, D. (1996). Categorical perception of morphed facial expressions.Visual Cognition,3, 81–117.
Campbell, R., Pascalis, O., Coleman, S. B., Wallace, B., &Benson, P. J. (1997). Are faces of different species perceived categorically by human observers?Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series B,264, 1429–1434.
Campbell, R., Woll, B., Benson, P., &Wallace, S. B. (1999). Categorical perception of face actions: Their role in sign language and in communicative facial displays.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,52, 67–95.
Davies, I. R. L., &Franklin, A. (2002). Categorical similarity may affect colour pop-out in infants after all.British Journal of Developmental Psychology,20, 185–203.
Durlach, N. I., &Braida, L. D. (1969). Intensity perception: I. Preliminary theory of intensity resolution.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,46, 372–383.
Fahle, M. (1994). Human pattern recognition: Parallel processing and perceptual learning.Perception,23, 411–427.
Fahle, M., Edelman, S., &Poggio, T. (1995). Fast perceptual learning and hyperactivity.Vision Research,35, 3003–3013.
Fletcher, R. (1980).The City University Color Vision Test (2nd ed.). London: Keeler.
Franklin, A., & Davies, I. R. L. (2002).Categorical colour perception in four-month infants. Manuscript submitted for publication.Fujisaka, H., & Kawashima, T. (1971). On the modes and hearing mechanisms of speech perception. InAnnual report of the Engineering Research Institute (Vol. 28, pp. 67–73). University of Tokyo, Faculty of Engineering.
Gerhardstein, P., Renner, P., &Rovee-Collier, C. (1999). The roles of perceptual and categorical similarity in color pop-out in infants.British Journal of Developmental Psychology,17, 403–420.
Goldstone, R. L. (1994). Influences of categorization on perceptual discrimination.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,123, 178–200.
Goldstone, R. L. (1995). Effects of categorization on color perception.Psychological Science,6, 298–304.
Goldstone, R. L. (1998). Perceptual learning.Annual Review of Psychology,49, 585–612.
Goldstone, R. L., Lippa, Y., &Shiffrin, R. M. (2001). Altering object representations through category learning.Cognition,78, 27–43.
Guenther, F. G., Husain, F. T., Cohen, M. A., &Shinn-Cunningham, B. G. (1999). Effects of categorization and discrimination training on auditory perceptual space.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,106, 2900–2912.
Harnad, S. (1987). Category induction and representation. In S. Harnad (Ed.),Categorical perception: The groundwork of cognition (pp. 535–565). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harnad, S., Hanson, S. J., &Lubin, J. (1991). Categorical perception and the evolution of supervised learning in neural nets. In D. W. Powers & L. Reeker (Eds.),Working papers of the AAAI spring symposium on machine learning of natural language and ontology (Document D91-09, pp. 65–74). Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, Kaiserslautern, FRG.
Hunt, R. W. G. (1987).Measuring color. Chichester, U.K.: Ellis Horwood.
Huttenlocher, J., Hedges, L. V., &Vevea, J. L. (2000). Why do categories affect stimulus judgment?Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,129, 220–241.
Kay, P., &Kempton, W. (1984). What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?American Anthropologist,86, 65–78.
Laws, G., Davies, I., &Andrews, C. (1995). Linguistic structure and non-linguistic cognition: English and Russian blues compared.Language & Cognitive Processes,10, 59–94.
Liberman, A. M., Harris, K. S., Hoffman, H. S., &Griffith, B. C. (1957). The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries.Journal of Experimental Psychology,54, 358–368.
Livingston, K. R., Andrews, J. K., &Harnad, S. (1998). Categorical perception effects induced by category learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,24, 732–753.
Macmillan, N. A. (1987). Beyond the categorical/continuous distinction: A psychophysical approach to processing modes. In S. Harnad (Ed.),Categorical perception: The groundwork of cognition (pp. 53–85). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malt, B. C., Sloman, S. A., Gennari, S., Shi, M., &Wang, Y. (1999). Knowing versus naming: Similarity and the linguistic categorization of artifacts.Journal of Memory & Language,40, 230–262.
Munsell, A. H. (1923).A color notation. Baltimore: Munsell Color Co.
Newell, F. N., &Bülthoff, H. H. (2002). Categorical perception of familiar objects.Cognition,85, 113–143.
Özgen, E., &Davies, I. R. L. (2002). Acquisition of categorical color perception: A perceptual learning approach to the linguistic relativity hypothesis.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,131, 477–493.
Pisoni, D. B. (1973). Auditory and phonetic memory codes in the discrimination of consonants and vowels.Perception & Psychophysics,13, 253–260.
Pisoni, D. B. (1991). Comment: Modes of processing speech and nonspeech signals. In I. G. Mattingly & M. Studdert-Kennedy (Eds.),Modularity and the motor theory of speech perception: Proceedings of a conference to honor Alvin M. Liberman (pp. 225–238). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Rack, J. P. (1985). Orthographic and phonetic coding in developmental dyslexia.British Journal of Psychology,76, 325–340.
Roberson, D., &Davidoff, J. (2000). The categorical perception of colors and facial expressions: The effect of verbal interference.Memory & Cognition,28, 977–986.
Rosch, E. (1972). Universals in color naming and memory.Journal of Experimental Psychology,93, 10–20.
Rosen, S., &Howell, P. (1987). Auditory, articulatory, and learning explanations of categorical perception in speech. In S. Harnad (Ed.),Categorical perception: The groundwork of cognition (pp. 113–160). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sandell, J. H., Gross, C. G., &Bornstein, M. H. (1983). Color categorization in macaques.Journal of Comparative & Physiological Psychology,93, 626–635.
Schyns, P. G., &Rodet, L. (1997). Categorization creates functional features.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,23, 681–696.
Snowden, C. T. (1987). A naturalistic view of categorical perception. In S. Harnad (Ed.),Categorical perception: The groundwork of cognition (pp. 332–354). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spencer, J. P., &Hund, A. M. (2002). Prototypes and particulars: Geometric and experience-dependent spatial categories.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,131, 16–37.
Swets, J. A. (1996).Signal detection theory and ROC analysis in psychology and diagnostics. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tajfel, H., &Wilkes, H. (1963). Classification and quantitative judgment.British Journal of Psychology,54, 101–114.
Ternes, W., &Yuille, J. (1972). Words and pictures in an STM task.Journal of Experimental Psychology,96, 78–866.
Travis, D. (1991).Effective color displays: Theory and practice. London: Academic Press.
Uchikawa, K., &Shinoda, H. (1996). Influence of basic color categories on color memory discrimination.Color Research & Application,21, 430–439.
Walsh, V., Kulikowski, J. J., Butler, S. R., &Carden, D. (1989). The effects of lesions of area V4 on the visual abilities of macaques: Colour categorization.Behavioural Brain Research,52, 81–89.
Wyszecki, G., &Stiles, W. S. (1982).Color science: Concepts and methods, quantitative data and formulae. New York: Wiley.
Young, A. W., Rowland, D., Calder, A. J., Etcoff, N. L., Seth, A., &Perrett, D. I. (1997). Facial expression megamix: Tests of dimensional and category accounts of emotion recognition.Cognition,63, 271–313.
Zatorre, R. J., &Halpern, A. R. (1979). Identification, discrimination, and selective adaptation of simultaneous musical intervals.Perception & Psychophysics,26, 384–395.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was supported in part by ESRC Studentships R00429824622 and R42200034447 to M.P. and A.W., and in part by ESRC Project Grant R000238310 to I.R.L.D., Davidoff, and Corbett. Experiments 1A and 1B were first reported in M.P.’s thesis, and Experiments 2A and 2B will form part of A.W.’s thesis. They have also been briefly reported at the conference of the Cognitive Section of the British Psychological Society (2001).
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pilling, M., Wiggett, A., Özgen, E. et al. Is color “categorical perception” really perceptual?. Memory & Cognition 31, 538–551 (2003). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196095
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196095