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The basic color categories of the Aguaruna Jivaro are described in detail, and the influence of culture contact is explored. Methodological problems and new elicitation procedures are discussed. Finally, some elaboration on and modification of the Berlin and Kay basic color term theory is suggested.

Neurophysiological evidence accumulated in the last twenty years supports Hering€s oppo- nent theory of color vision. In addition, the general, cross-cultural, and universal theoy of color naming for all languages proposed by Berlin and Kay has been corroborated. Hays et al. speculated that color-term salience might be reduced to a neuroanatomical basis. An evaluation of our color-naming tests in German, French, English, Hebrew, Japanese, Quechi, and Misquito, and linguistic tests carried out, together with other linguistic data, show clearly that the linguistics ofcolor terms is corroborated by the oppo- nenl theuy of color vision. [color lexicon, color naming, categorization of color, opponent color theory, psycholinguistics of color terms, cultural influence on color naming]

The purpose of this study was to examine the use of color terms by male and female elementary school children. Thirty-six children were asked to label colors. A significant difference was found between younger females and older females, tentatively indicating a developmental trend that may explain the differences in color term production between adult females and adult males. No significant differences were found between males and females, or between younger males and older males.

As in previous studies, the interference condition of the Stroop (color words printed in incongruent ink colors) was presented to male and female subjects. Unlike earlier studies in which word and color responses were elicited randomly, subjects knew in advance what to expect. Word responses were grouped together as were the color responses. Fifteen males and 15 females served in each of two conditions – word responses first or color responses first. In this altered format, an analysis of covariance revealed no gender or order of presentation differences in relation of word to color responses. When analyzed separately, there were no differences on the color responses but significantly shorter latencies for males on word responses. Word response latencies were shorter when presented before rather than after color responses for all subjects. The strong Stroop effect was ever present.

Inherent physical-perceptual distinctiveness plays a large role in color salience. In addition, words for color referents vary in lexical salience in a way that is concordant with the physical-perceptual distinctiveness of these referents. Highly distinctive referents typically receive salient labels, while less distinctive referents receive nonsalient ones. Hence the lexical salience of color words reflects underlying physical-perceptual salience. However, in addition to mirroring physical-perceptual distinctiveness lexical salience also magnifies it. Although language does not set the agenda for color categorization, it greatly augments the salience of color categories. Thus lexical salience plays a crucial mediating and amplifying role between the physical-perceptual distinctiveness of color referents and color behavior. These findings are consistent with both a universalist interpretation of color terminology and a Whorfian hypothesis which asserts that color language exerts an active influence on hum...

The membership function describing the degree of association of a color sample to a specified color name is estimated experimentally through fuzzy statistical experiment. Here, we are interested in the surface color of opaque materials including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, gray, and black. The characteristics of the membership function for these colors are found to be affected appreciably by the light source used.

Chinese-English bilinguals in Grades 2, 4, 8, 10, and in college read Chinese and English color words in black or in colored print in the corresponding language. Subjects were more efficient in reading Chinese than English. This superiority effect of reading Chinese gradually decreased as subjects' familiarity with English increased. Furthermore, skilled readers were less susceptible than less skilled readers to the introduction of conflicting colors of ink. This result indicates that the pattern of the reversed Stroop (1935; Dunbar & MacLeod, 1984) effect is related to the proficiency of word processing.

It is argued that the structure of the Munsell solid is not sufficient to explain the evolution of color terms as Zollinger (1984) has argued. A manifold model of color perception is described with a local metric structure of discriminability and a global categorical structure. This model elucidates the interdependency of the different levels of constraints on color naming and permits the integration of experimental results which cannot be explained in the model underlying Zollinger's (1984) color-metric argument for the emergence of ‘turquoise’.

The information-processing performance of 12 retarded and 12 nonretarded adolescents was compared. Using reaction time keys each subject classified color words, secondary color words, non-color words, nonsense syllables, and stick figures according to the color of ink in which each stimulus was presented. Reaction time of the nonretarded subjects was significantly faster than that of retarded subjects; color words and secondary color words significantly interfered with processing performance as measured by correct reaction time. The results indicate that the Stroop task interferes with response initiation rather than memory retrieval and that the locus of interference for retarded and nonretarded subjects is equivalent.

Institutionalized retardates were examined on a special format of a task requiring them to name the colors of 36 color patches and to name the color of the ink in which 36 incongruent color words were printed on separate cards. Mean reaction time for the incongruent condition was significantly longer than that for the color patches and the difference was independent of fatigue and stimulus size. The color-word interference effect previously reported with normal populations when given the Stroop test was demonstrated for this retarded sample using a special format.

In a modified Stroop paradigm, Kahneman and Henik (1981) varied the spatial location of incompatible color words in relation to the position of the ink color to be named. A large effect on reaction time was found if the word was in the same position as the color, and a greatly reduced effect was found if it was in a different location. Kahneman and Henik concluded that (1) attention can be directed only to preattentively defined perceptual objects, (2) attention facilitates all the responses associated with properties or elements of the selected object, and (3) word reading is not automatic as proposed in unlimited capacity (UC) models. To evaluate these conclusions, the same paradigm was used in three experiments. The first two essentially replicated Kahneman and Henik’s findings and supported the first two conclusions. The third experiment tested the capacity issue. The results provided no reason for rejecting the UC assumption. A theoretical analysis is outlined showing how a UC processing model with an object-selection stage and a subsequent dimension-selection stage can account for the results obtained. This model is an extended version of Van der Heijden’s (1981) postcategorical filtering model.

To name colors, Tarahumara speakers use basic color terms carrying obligatory modifiers. The modifiers specify the grade of membership of a color stimulus in a color category. The internal structure of color categories is inferred from modifiers and from focal and mapping tasks. Some categories, though named by a single basic color term, have disjunctions in internal structure corresponding to separate categories predicted at later evolutionary stages, interinformant variation suggests that Tarahumara is in the process of evolving from one evolutionary stage to another. [cognitive anthropology, color, evolution, category structure, Tarahumara]

Incidental memory for the association between color word and print color in the Stroop color-word test was examined. Subjects received either color or neutral words in various print colors or color words in black with a color patch below. Subjects named the color or the word aspect of each stimulus. For all conditions, the color-word association was held constant across trials. After naming one aspect of each stimulus, subjects were tested for their memory of the association between that aspect and the unnamed one. Subjects required more time to name the print color of color words than to perform the other event-naming tasks, and word naming was faster than color naming. Naming the print color yielded higher incidental retention of the color-word association than did naming the color patch or the word. Slowing the pace for word naming increased retention of the association. These results are discussed in relation to current models of the Stroop effect.

The Stroop Color-Word test was employed to study the amount of interference in naming colors when stimuli were presented in either visual field. It was hypothesized that more Stroop interference would occur in the dominant hemisphere. The subjects were 24 right-handed college students, between 18 and 25 years old. There were three conditions in each visual field: Interference, Reading, and Naming. Each slide was presented for 150 msec preceded by a fixation dot. Subjects were asked to verbally report as fast and as accurately as they could either the color words or the color names, depending upon the conditions. Reaction times and error rates were analyzed. As expected, significantly higher error rates were obtained when color words were presented in the right visual field under the Stroop interference condition. Under this same condition, reaction time analysis yielded no significant differences between hemispheres.

This paper considers a practical problem involving a multilevel system: color perception of individual human beings, man-machine interactions, and changing social factors. Previous research on individuals found a significant but noncritical decline in performance on a color name interference task from noon to 8 p.m. compared to other times of the day. The hypothesis now tested is whether critical diffences in color-matching efficiency for a group occur over a 24-hour period. Subjects were 13 color matchers and 30 printers who worked rotating shifts. Data were drawn from production records for 38 pairs of multicolor jobs performed over three four-week (accounting) periods. Data were analyzed via a cusp catastrophe model for two criteria: color matching time (R2 =.99) and printing paper wasted (R2 =.98). Job length was the bifurcation factor. Accounting period was the asymmetry factor, which was interpreted in terms of organizational dynamics that were taking place. Thecentral conclusion was that critical differences in color-matching efficiency could be observed over a 24-hour period when certain social or task factors are operating.

A series of experiments were performed to determine the effects of instructions upon color naming data. Although color name is basically a function of stimulus wavelength, even slight changes in the response categories available for the 5 led to substantial changes in the pattern of Ss’ response allocation.

In that rich volume, The Decline and Fall of the West, we observe that the color preferences of a given people or age are considered as a part of the accumulated evidence that finally places the cultural stage of the group in the whole vast Spenglerian cycle. The Greeks, we learn, were fond of primitive reds and yellows, while the Christians, partly in revolt against Greek paganism, came to prefer the other end of the color scale, the greens and blues, and the purity of white. Red had become for them a symbol of sin and bloodshed, and yellow a mark of shame. These observations are further tied up with Spengler's time-space theories. The Greeks, whose time-space conceptions are labelled as present, as contrasted with our own efforts to link the dim past and the remote future by the aid of our historical and evolutionary perspective, are said naturally to prefer red and its variants as symbolic of life, love, and splendid action; while the Christians as naturally preferred the more remote greens, blues, and whites as symbolic of meditation and worship, the projection of interest into the mystic, the supernatural, the life yet unrealized. A later romantic development also associated blues and greens with nature and its poetry, while whites, grays and blacks inevitably spell the abstract, the psychic, and the mystery of the unknown.

SUMMARY Four cognitive styles were studied in 20 adolescent boys previously diagnosed as hyperactive and 20 normal controls. The results indicated that the hyperactives were not impaired in their ability to perform on tasks involving highly overlearned abilities, i.e., color naming and reading color words, even under distracting conditions. They were deficient, however, in their approach to tasks in which there was a greater degree of response uncertainty. Hyperactives took less lime to reflect over a problem solution when a number of alternative solutions were available and had greater difficulty isolating a simple figure hidden in a complex background.

Caucasian college students made semantic differential ratings of color names concurrent with their participation in studies of racial attitudes. The evaluative meanings assigned to the color names Black and Brown were positively correlated with four measures of attitude toward Negro persons, a result consistent with the hypothesis that the designation of racial groups by color names is one determinant of attitudes toward the racial groups.

Judgments of the appearance of colored papers blended with different proportions of white were obtained using a rotating color mixer. Responses consisted of a mark on a line labeled with the appropriate color name at one end and “white” at the other. Prior context was avoided by obtaining only single judgments. It was found for all six color displays that distance from the colored end of the line was proportional to the square root of the proportion of white present in the mixture. This square root relation is in keeping with the physical correlate theory and with other experiments involving gray papers, point sources, and luminous fields.

A new procedure was found to be effective for generation of interference to color naming. In this procedure, separate word and color stimuli are presented to the right and left of fixation. Incongruent names delayed color naming, and congruent combinations of words and colors produced a facilitation of color naming relative to a control condition in which Xs were presented opposite the color. This bilatefal presentation procedure makes it possible to study interference to dimension naming for dimensions that .cannot be integrally combined with words. The procedure also has potential for study of parallel processing, selective attention, and functional differences between the hemispheres. Naming the color of a color patch when the patch is shaped to spell a color name incongruent to the color takes considerably longer than naming of a nonword color patch (Stroop, 1935). Kamlet and Egeth (1969) presented white words on small rectangles of color and found a similar delay of background color naming when the words were incongruent color names. Using a modified individual stimulus procedure, Dyer and Severance (1973) presented the word denoting a color in black ink in a tachistoscope and followed it immediately, or after a short interval, by a color patch that was a series of Xs. Delays for color naming occurred for conditions where the black word was incongruent to the color of the Xs. Some speeding of color naming occurred when the black word was congruent to the color of the Xs. This delay and facilitation of color naming was relative to a control condition where the colored Xs were preceded by a series of black Vs. Although significant, the delay in color naming was less than that obtained in studies with the word and color physically combined. In the present study, black color names

Eleven focal colors are named by basic color terms in many languages. The most salient colors (black, white, and perhaps red) are named in all languages; the least salient of the set are named in fewer languages. Salience correlates with earliness of introduction, as measured by a scale of social evolution; with brevity of expression, as measured by phonemic length of basic color terms; with frequency of use, as measured by frequency of basic color terms in literary languages; and with frequency of mention in ethnographic literature. None of these correlations are established in the pioneer study of Berlin and Kay (1969), a study whose defects are well exposed by Durbin (1972) and Wescott (1970). The first two were documented respectively in Naroll (1970) and Durbin (1972); the last two are documented here. These four correlations independently support the Berlin-Kay color salience theory. They furnish a sound basis for further research on color term salience in particular and indeed on salience phenomena in general. We speculate that salience may be an important general principle of cultural evolution.

A color-naming experiment was performed in which both surround luminance and exposure duration were varied. The data showed substantial effects from these changes; however, none could be interpreted to indicate the presence of a Bezold-Brucke shift or tritanopia.

We have studied about some effects on the normal color vision under various environmental conditions, and relationships between the abnormal color vision and road signals.1) Visual acuity standard and color visionThree classifications of visual acuity are distinguished in the license of car driving in Japan. These are as follows:(1) 1st. group ordinary license)visual acuity-1) above 0.7 with both eyes and above 0.3 with each eye.2) below 0.3 with one eye, the other eye required to be above O. 7, and visual field more than 150°2) 2 nd. group (professional license)visual acuity...above 0.8 with both eyes and above 0.5 with each eyeHere, these steps are named 0.8 for (2), 0.7 for (1)-1 and 0.3 for (1)-2, to the normol vision 1.2 provisionaly.The visual acuity was measured by the color contrast test types, Landolt's ring, which were combinations of six colors using traffic signs. They were illuminated by fluorescent lamp, mercury lamp and sodium lamp. The relative legibility was compared with normal vision 1.2. On an average the rate was 0.8, 70%, 0.7, 60% and 0.3, 55% of the normal viewing distance. Decreasing rates were always almost constant for different color combinations and different light sources. Between the signs of white and color combinations, white on color sign was better recognized than color on white. Under the mercury lamp, red on blue was hard to see.On the highway experiment, the legibility of same color combination signs varied depending on the conditions of environs and the pattern of signs.2) DazzlingQuantitative static perimetry was used to measure the changes of visual threshold by dazzling. At fi rst, the threshold was obtained at eath 5 degrees point from center to 30 degrees tempolo-horizontal axis, then one dazzling light was put on the side of fixation point. The changing ratio of the threshold with or wothout dazzling, at 5 degrees fom fixation point, was about 1/30 and from 15 degrees to 30 degrees it was about 1/20.After dazzling to whole retina, the retardation time of perception was obtained for nine color test objects from 401 nm to 658 nm. “The time was not the same for each color, after 3, 000 asb, 5” dazzling. At the fixation point, the maximum retarding was found at 401nm (violet), 502nm (bluegreen) and 603nm (red), At 25 degrees periphery from center, the same result was obtained, but at 502nm, the delay was more marked than that of the center.3) Abnormal color visionAmong 47 drivers of dyschromatopsy, we found considerable numbers with strong daltonism. The classification by anomoloscope was 12 protan, 5 protanope, 21 deutan, 8 deutetanope and 1 protan or deutan. These dyschromats have not experienced any traffic accident caused by an error of the signal colors.A color name call test, using a frame by with 145 spots of signal colors on one plate, was done with the dyschromats. The rate of errors was as follows: colorblindness 62.0%, colorweakness 32.2%. It is evident that there is some difference in color perception of dyschromatopsy between the experimental results and discrimination of signals on the traffic.These results suggest that the red signal of the road traffic should be made larger and brighter than the other colors.

Ss from two cultures with markedly different color terminologies were tested on two color-judgment tasks. One was a nonverbal task of color matching from memory, while the other was a verbal task of color-naming. Both tasks were performed by 41 American Ss and 40 New Guinea Dani (who have a basically two-term color language). Multidimensional scaling based upon the four resulting sets of data yielded structures that were more similar under the memory condition than under the naming condition. For neither culture were equally distant colors confused in memory more within than across name boundaries. Retention of color images in short-term memory appears to be unaffected by wide cultural differences in the semantic reference of color words.

The pigmentation of fungi has long attracted attention for various reasons. Many are highly colored and therefore readily attract the eye and excite the interest of the observer. To the systematist, color has furnished an easy means of classification, and biologic nomenclature is laden with color words. It is generally admitted however that a color basis is very unsatisfactory for purposes of classifying or naming organisms. As Buller' states, it would be interesting if some law of progressive coloration could be discovered; but no attempt to work out the phylogenesis of the color of spores has yet been made. Buller thinks that colorlessness is the primitive condition of spores and that pigments are only gradually developed, probably by a series of mutations.

Racial groups are often designated by color names, with Negroes called “black” and Caucasians “white.” Previous research with adults had shown that the color name black has a negative (“bad”) evaluative connotation and white a positive (“good”) connotation. The present study, designed to measure the degree of awareness of black-white evaluative connotation in Caucasian children, demonstrated that the black-white color-meaning concept is developing during the preschool years—the period during which racial awareness was also shown to be developing. Possible origins of the black-white evaluative concept in young children were discussed, as was the possible role of the concept in the formation of racial attitudes of Caucasian children toward Negroes.

The amount of interference and priming is examined in a Stroop color-naming task, in which distractors were either color words (conventional Stroop) or nonwords comprising the first two letters of the color words (color pseudowords). It was found that both color words and color pseudowords produced an interference effect, and that the amount of interference by these two types of stimuli was highly correlated across subjects. It was also found that color words led to a reaction time cost when distractor and subsequent target were the same, compared to trials on which no such relation existed. This was an instance of negative priming (Tipper, 1985). Conversely, color pseudowords led to positive priming and reaction time saving, under the same conditions. These data suggest that interference is related to the initial structural elements of the words, and that it may occur regardless of whether or not words can be fully analyzed, whereas priming effects may depend on whether it is possible to analyze the stimuli on a semantic level.

Recent studies of the “Blue Phenomenon” have shown that in some countries outside the USA not ‘blue’, but ‘red’ or ‘black’ is the predominant color choice. It is argued that the differences between countries, in addition to an explanation by cultural factors, might reflect different formulations of the question used to provoke a response. It is shown that in the Netherlands responses to the question to write ‘your favorite color’ are considerably different from responses to the question to write ‘the first color name that comes to mind.’ It is concluded that comparison of color-production phenomena over countries requires a better control over formulation of the question.

Ss were instructed to hold the incongruous color words upside down while naming the color in which the word was printed. The color-naming time was significantly shorter than that of the conventional naming situation. This result seems to confirm the claim that reducing the distracting inadvertent word-reading involved in the task of color naming will decrease the interference in the Stroop test. This implies that the involuntary word-reading which introduces semantic interference to the required response is a source of the Stroop effect.

Color patches could simultaneously be manually counted and conflicting color words named in the time required for one of the tasks alone. The independence of verbal and nonverbal information processing resembles “split-brain” behavior. Naming color patches while counting color words took more time than would have been required for doing the individual tasks successively, indicating response competition in the standard Stroop test. Form or location stimuli substituted for color words reduced interference when naming color patches.

Sa who were asked to name the colors in which color words were printed named them more slowly than was the case for colors in which animal words were printed. When, however, they had to sort words into categories depending on whether the words or the colors they were printed in were the same or different, colors were sorted faster than words. It is argued that a distinction should be made between processing involving naming and processing involving simple recognition of physical features.

Ten colors and 10 color words were scaled for meaningfulness by means of Noble’s m and a’ scale. The most frequent verbal responses to colors and color words were also collected.

Gumenik & Glass (1970) claimed to have shown a reversed form of Stroop interference in which implicit naming responses to irrelevant colors delayed the reading of color words combined with the colors. In their study, a legibility reduction that did not affect color visibility was interpreted as increasing this interference from color naming to the “weakened” reading response. However, their results could have been only the result of lower legibility for the colored words compared to the control black words. The legibility reduction would be expected to increase any initial legibility difference between colored and black words. In the present study, a neutral word condition and a reduced legibility control condition were included, and evidence was obtained for a bona fide “reversed interference” that was not the result of legibility differences or naming practice. The results were discussed in terms of a symmetrical failure of selective attention to focus on either the color or word analyzer.

Four color names—red, yellow, green, and blue—can be used singly or combined in pairs to describe all other colors. Orange, for example, can be described as a reddish yellow, cyan as a bluish green, and purple as a reddish blue. Some dyadic color names (such as reddish green and bluish yellow) describe colors that are not normally realizable. By stabilizing the retinal image of the boundary between a pair of red and green stripes (or a pair of yellow and blue stripes) but not their outer edges, however, the entire region can be perceived simultaneously as both red and green (or yellow and blue).

The visual perception and linguistic categorization of color are related topics which have received extensive and long-term attention from a number of disciplines. Linguists, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and physical and biological scientists have been, in various ways, preoccupied with color -- usually as an example of some more general type of relationship among experience, cognition, and linguistic or cultural behavior.

The present investigation examined the possibility that the explanation for the Stroop phenomenon lies in the hemispheric asymmetry of the human brain. Forty-eight male and 73 female students from freshman psychology classes served as subjects for this study. There were 37 males and 53 females who were right-handed and monolingual; 16 left-handers (five males, 11 females); and 13 bilingual subjects (four male, nine female) included in the sample. Only one person was both left-handed and bilingual. All subjects responded to color words printed in incongruent colors by reading the word or reporting the color in which the word was printed. Response latencies were recorded in hundredths of a second for each of the 36 trials for each subject. For all individuals, response latency was consistently shorter when reading the word than when reporting the color. Females demonstrated a shorter latency for the color stimuli than did males; however males demonstrated a shorter latency for the word stimuli. Evidence indicated that the Stroop phenomenon may best be explained by different modes of neural processing for symbolic and iconic stimuli for all individuals. It was further indicated that females have greater flexibility between hemispheres unless other intervening factors (i.e., hand preference or language differences) provide a symmetry in hemispheric functioning not ordinarily found in males.

Right-handed (dextral) and left-handed (sinistral) males and females (N = 15) were compared for language lateralization in a visual half-field (VHF) incongruent color-words paradigm. The paradigm consists of repeated brief (less than 200 msec) presentations of color-words written in an incongruent color. Presentations are either to the right or to the left of center fixation. The task of the subject is to report the color the word is written in on each trial, ignoring the color-word. Color-bars and congruent color-words were used as control stimuli. Vocal reaction time (VRT) and error frequency were used as dependent measures. The logic behind the paradigm is that incongruent color-words should lead to a greater cognitive conflict when presented in the half-field contralateral to the dominant hemisphere. The results showed significantly longer VRTs in the right half-field for the dextral subjects. Furthermore, significantly more errors were observed in the male dextral group when the incongruent stimuli were presented in the right half-field. There was a similar trend in the data for the sinistral males. No differences between half-fields were observed for the female groups. It is concluded that the present results strengthen previous findings from our laboratory (Hugdahl and Franzon, 1985) that the incongruent color-words paradigm is a useful non-invasive technique for the study of lateralization in the intact brain.

The results of several previous experiments have suggested that interference in the Stroop color-naming task is greater for color words that are also members of the set of possible color-naming responses. However, all previous experiments had strength of association to the concept of color and, in most cases, word frequency confounded with membership in the response set. The present experiments controlled for these factors and obtained strong evidence that interference is substantially greater when the printed words are also members of the response set. In addition, it was shown that for color words that are not from the response set the amount of interference is a function of the strength of association of the words with the concept of color. It was concluded that there is selective activation of the color-naming response set in memory. Internal activation of the remaining color terms is a function of how strongly they are associated with other color-naming responses.

The effect of incongruent color words on speed of classifying ink colors was measured in visual scanning tasks and in card sorting tasks. In both cases, little or no interference effects were noted when the classification allowed focusing on a single ink color or a set of highly similar colors (adjacent hues). Substantial interference occurred when the task required grouping of three dissimilar colors (nonadjacent hues). These findings suggest that the relative efficiency of name and visual codes in making perceptual classifications is largely dependent upon the memory requirements imposed by the task.

Variations in irrelevant ink color impaired the processing of color words in a card-sorting task, demonstrating the occurrence of a reverse Stroop effect in a task without a spoken response. The magnitude of the reverse Stroop effect was not significantly affected by whether the card sorting was carried out in isolation, while irrelevantly articulating, while retaining digits, or while irrelevantly imaging.

The synchronic distributional pattern of potential basic color terms in one dialect of Tswana is examined in a wide range of construction types. From this pattern the non-basic status of the term lephutsi emerges, as well as a constraint requiring the exclusion of animals from the semantic extension of basic terms designating hue. Accepting lephutsi as non-basic, however, leaves a pattern of semantic reference violating a widely assumed universal constraint governing historical stages in the evolution of color names. To resolve this dilemma, a comparative analysis of color term reference in the Sotho languages is undertaken. Based on this analysis, the semantic reference for one basic color term in Tswana is hypothesized to have undergone a historical change, whereby the universal constraints on color naming give way to the constraint governing basic terms for hue.

This study investigated symbolic comparison of color similarity using a triplet paradigm. Results showed that the time to choose which of two color samples is more similar to a color name was a function of several measures of distance between the samples relative to the focal color for the category name. Since colors appear to be represented in memory only as names and images and not as abstract entities such as features or propositions, these results provide support for models of symbolic comparison that assume that items are stored and compared as mental analogs.

When Chinese subjects tried to name the color of characters which represented conflicting color words, they showed markedly greater interference than did English speaking readers performing an English version of the same task. This effect cannot be attributed to bilingualism among the Chinese subjects since bilinguals in other languages show smaller Stroop-interference than monolingual controls. Instead, there may be some fundamental differences in the perceptual demands of reading Chinese and English which can have widespread implications for human information processing.

Two groups of 12 volunteers manually (button pushing) or verbally identified the ink color of 5, randomly ordered and tachistoscopically presented, kinds of stimulus conditions, specified by the nature of the noncolor information and the relationship between color and noncolor information: Congruent Color Words, Noncolor Words, Scrambled Color Words, Nonword Geometric Shapes, and Noncongruent Color Words. With verbal response, facilitation of reaction time occurred for Congruent Color Words compared to Scrambled Color Words and Noncolor Words but not when compared to the Nonword Control, while with manual response facilitation appeared for all comparisons. Interference appeared for both groups, with Noncongruent Color Words having the slowest reaction time. The present design corrected for inadequacies in previous studies and more firmly established the conclusion of parallel perceptual processing of color and noncolor information, with facilitation/interference effects being localized in postperceptual decision operations of signal summation and response competition.

Publisher Summary This chapter describes a set of experiments designed to investigate Lana's color perception and color classification. Lana has demonstrated that she does possess sufficient cognitive capabilities to assimilate and adopt arbitrary codes and that she uses these codes to describe her world as she sees it. Three separate aspects of Experiment I support this conclusion. First, Lana's assignment of color names to various areas of color-space did not produce areas identified by a given color term surrounding the training color for that term with random responding at areas perceptually distant from the training colors. Second, Lana's great regularity in giving consistent color names to central and border hues regardless of great changes in brightness or saturation suggests that her color names are codes for hue attributes and not just names for specific physical stimuli. The third type of evidence supporting Lana's use of her color terms as conceptual codes comes from the observation that only two color names ever competed as a response for a given color chip and that these color names were always the names for spectrally adjacent hues. This finding indicates that a border color received different responses on different presentations because the chip looked two colors and not because it was an unfamiliar color and she was guessing among one of six possible alternatives. The present findings are sufficient to conclude that Lana does possess sufficient cognitive capabilities to assimilate arbitrary codes and that she uses these codes to describe her world as she sees it.

My contribution to this Symposium is in three parts: first, I outline a ‘simulation’ approach to the study of judicial behavior in general; second, I give an account of an exercise in the simulation of clinical judgement; and finally, I attempt to show how this approach to clinical argument may help to sustain relevant clinical practice in a changing world.

The effect of several procedural variables was investigated in a discrete-trials Stroop task. Undergraduate students identified the color of four types of stimuli (asterisks, words unrelated to color, and incongruent and congruent Stroop stimuli) using verbal responses, buttons labeled with color words, and buttons labeled with colors. Set size was manipulated by presenting 2, 3, 4, or 5 different colors in a given trial block. A significant Stroop effect occurred in the verbal response condition, the size of the Stroop effect was reduced in the word-button condition, and the Stroop effect was eliminated in the color-button condition. Increases in set size produced linear increases in response time but did not influence the size of the Stroop effect.