ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Focal colors across languages are representative members of color categories.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Search Efficiency Drives Reference Production Across Modalities, But Colour Is Special.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Creating Something Different: Similarity, Contrast, and Representativeness in Categorization.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- The origin of color categories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Increasing magnitude of color differences amplifies category effects.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Spatial communication systems across languages reflect universal action constraints.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Corvids optimize working memory by categorizing continuous stimuli.Communications biology · 2023Article
- On the utility of Colour in shape analysis: An introduction to Colour science via palaeographical case studies.Heliyon · 2023Article
- What Are Group Level Traits and How Do They Evolve?Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2023Article
- Color appearance and the end of Hering's Opponent-Colors Theory.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2023Review
- Task state representations in vmPFC mediate relevant and irrelevant value signals and their behavioral influence.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Invariant categorical color regions across illuminant change coincide with focal colors.Journal of vision · 2023Article
- The Mental Lexicon Features of the Hakka-Mandarin Dialect Bilingual.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- Neural Hierarchy of Color Categorization: From Prototype Encoding to Boundary Encoding.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
- The Verriest Lecture: Adventures in blue and yellow.Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision · 2020Article
- Communication efficiency of color naming across languages provides a new framework for the evolution of color terms.Cognition · 2020Article
- Perceptual constraints on colours induce the universality of linguistic colour categorisation.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Differential coding of perception in the world's languages.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Color naming across languages reflects color use.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Focal colors, or best examples of color terms, have traditionally been viewed as either the underlying source of cross-language color-naming universals or derived from category boundaries that vary widely across languages. Existing data partially support and partially challenge each of these views. Here, we advance a position that synthesizes aspects of these two traditionally opposed positions and accounts for existing data. We do so by linking this debate to more general principles. We show that best examples of named color categories across 112 languages are well-predicted from category extensions by a statistical model of how representative a sample is of a distribution, independently shown to account for patterns of human inference. This model accounts for both universal tendencies and variation in focal colors across languages. We conclude that categorization in the contested semantic domain of color may be governed by principles that apply more broadly in cognition and that these principles clarify the interplay of universal and language-specific forces in color naming.
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