Biological origins of color categorization

The biological basis of the commonality in color lexicons across languages has been hotly debated for decades. Prior evidence that infants categorize color could provide support for the hypothesis that color categorization systems are not purely constructed by communication and culture. Here, we inv...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2017-05, Vol.114 (21), p.5545-5550
Main Authors: Skelton, Alice E., Catchpole, Gemma, Abbott, Joshua T., Bosten, Jenny M., Franklin, Anna
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation
Alignment
Axes (reference lines)
Babies
Biological Sciences
Biology
Boundaries
Categories
Classification
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Color
Color Perception - physiology
Color vision
Color Vision - physiology
Commonality
Constraints
Female
Human communication
Humans
Infant
Infants
Language
Languages
Male
Memory
Origins
Recognition
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Summary:The biological basis of the commonality in color lexicons across languages has been hotly debated for decades. Prior evidence that infants categorize color could provide support for the hypothesis that color categorization systems are not purely constructed by communication and culture. Here, we investigate the relationship between infants’ categorization of color and the commonality across color lexicons, and the potential biological origin of infant color categories. We systematically mapped infants’ categorical recognition memory for hue onto a stimulus array used previously to document the color lexicons of 110 nonindustrialized languages. Following familiarization to a given hue, infants’ response to a novel hue indicated that their recognition memory parses the hue continuum into red, yellow, green, blue, and purple categories. Infants’ categorical distinctions aligned with common distinctions in color lexicons and are organized around hues that are commonly central to lexical categories across languages. The boundaries between infants’ categorical distinctions also aligned, relative to the adaptation point, with the cardinal axes that describe the early stages of color representation in retinogeniculate pathways, indicating that infant color categorization may be partly organized by biological mechanisms of color vision. The findings suggest that color categorization in language and thought is partially biologically constrained and have implications for broader debate on how biology, culture, and communication interact in human cognition.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1612881114