ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
The origin of color categories.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- 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
- Asymmetries in hue percepts and early cortical color coding: Evidence from chromatic visual evoked potentials.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Swiping colors in virtual reality: How stable are color category borders?Journal of vision · 2026Article
- The representation of object concepts across the brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Asymmetries in hue measured behaviorally and with visual evoked potentials.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Human and primate categorical understanding of color.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
To what extent does concept formation require language? Here, we exploit color to address this question and ask whether macaque monkeys have color concepts evident as categories. Macaques have similar cone photoreceptors and central visual circuits to humans, yet they lack language. Whether Old World monkeys such as macaques have consensus color categories is unresolved, but if they do, then language cannot be required. If macaques do not have color categories, then color categories in humans are unlikely to derive from innate properties of visual encoding and likely to depend on cognitive abilities such as language that differ between monkeys and humans. We tested macaques by adapting a match-to-sample paradigm used in humans to uncover color categories from errors in matches, and we analyzed the data using computational simulations that assess the possibility of unrecognized distortions in the perceptual uniformity of color space. The results provide evidence that humans have consensus cognitive color categories and macaques do not. One animal showed evidence for a private color category, demonstrating that monkeys have the capacity to form color categories even if they do not form consensus color categories. Taken together, the results imply that consensus color categories in humans, for which there is ample evidence, must depend upon language or other cognitive abilities.
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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.