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Another look at category effects on colour perception and their left hemispheric lateralisation: no evidence from a colour identification task

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Abstract

The present study aimed to replicate category effects on colour perception and their lateralisation to the left cerebral hemisphere (LH). Previous evidence for lateralisation of colour category effects has been obtained with tasks where a differently coloured target was searched within a display and participants reported the lateral location of the target. However, a left/right spatial judgment may yield LH-laterality effects per se. Thus, we employed an identification task that does not require a spatial judgment and used the same colour set that previously revealed LH-lateralised category effects. The identification task was better performed with between-category colours than with within-category task both in terms of accuracy and latency, but such category effects were bilateral or RH-lateralised, and no evidence was found for LH-laterality effects. The accuracy scores, moreover, indicated that the category effects derived from low sensitivities for within-blue colours and did not reflect the effects of categorical structures on colour perception. Furthermore, the classic “category effects” were observed in participants’ response biases, instead of sensitivities. The present results argue against both the LH-lateralised category effects on colour perception and the existence of colour category effects per se.

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Notes

  1. Since we employed a uniform black background, instead of grey background (Siok et al. 2009), participants’ adaptation levels might be different from those of previous studies.

  2. The degrees of freedom were adjusted by employing .50 of the epsilon for lower-bound.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research Abroad for TS (H24-794).

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  1. Takashi Suegami

    Present address: Graduate School of Biomedical Science, Nagasaki University, 1-12-4, Sakamoto, Nagasaki city, Nagasaki, Japan

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Takashi Suegami, Samira Aminihajibashi & Bruno Laeng

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  1. Takashi Suegami
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  2. Samira Aminihajibashi
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Correspondence to Takashi Suegami.

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Suegami, T., Aminihajibashi, S. & Laeng, B. Another look at category effects on colour perception and their left hemispheric lateralisation: no evidence from a colour identification task. Cogn Process 15, 217–226 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-013-0595-8

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