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Infant Color Categories

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Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology

Synonyms

Prelinguistic color categorization/categorical perception

Definition

A response to color in infancy that indicates that infants can divide the continuum of color into discrete groups.

Key Principles and Concepts

Although humans can discriminate millions of colors, language typically refers to color using a limited number of discrete categories (e.g., red, green, blue). Color categories are not only present in language (color terms), they are also present in “thought.” For example, at least under some circumstances, adults’ perceptual or cognitive judgments of color (e.g., color memory, search, or similarity judgments) are affected by whether colors come from the same or different linguistic color categories [see Hanley]. There has been considerable debate on the origin of color categories and on the extent to which color categories are arbitrarily constructed through language (see ref. [1] for review). To establish whether there is a nonlinguistic route to color...

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References

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Acknowledgements

The writing of this entry was supported by a European Research Council Grant to AF (Project CATEGORIES, ref: 283605).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology, University of Surrey, GU2 7XH, Surrey, UK

    Anna Franklin

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  1. Anna Franklin
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Correspondence to Anna Franklin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Design University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

    Ronnier Luo

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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Franklin, A. (2013). Infant Color Categories. In: Luo, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_57-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_57-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-27851-8

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