ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Biological origins of color categorization.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cognition does not automatically influence perception: Evidence from neural encoding of colors belonging to different categories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Shape-similarity gain: A selection profile for simple objects.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Cross-linguistic comparison of color word learning in German and Japanese children shows universal and language-specific processes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Reply to Bosten and Franklin: Children's color qualia structure is similar to adults'.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Comparing color qualia structures through a similarity task in young children versus adults.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Human and primate categorical understanding of color.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The origin of color categories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Hidden in red: evidence for and against red camouflage in a jumping spider (Saitis barbipes).Die Naturwissenschaften · 2024Article
- Increasing magnitude of color differences amplifies category effects.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Color appearance and the end of Hering's Opponent-Colors Theory.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- RUBubbles as a novel tool to study categorization learning.Behavior research methods · 2022Article
- Infant color perception: Insight into perceptual development.Child development perspectives · 2022Article
- Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- Ensemble coding of color and luminance contrast.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2021Article
- "Red-Green" or "Brown-Green" Dichromats? The Accuracy of Dichromat Basic Color Terms Metacognition Supports Denomination Change.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Testing the Cross-Cultural Generality of Hering's Theory of Color Appearance.Cognitive science · 2020Article
- The Verriest Lecture: Adventures in blue and yellow.Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision · 2020Article
- Infants look longer at colours that adults like when colours are highly saturated.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Article
- Communication efficiency of color naming across languages provides a new framework for the evolution of color terms.Cognition · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.