EFFECTS OF CATEGORIZATION ON COLOR-PERCEPTION

Subjects were shown simple objects and were asked to reproduce the colors of the objects. Even though the objects remained on the screen while subjects reproduced the colors and the objects' shapes were irrelevant to the subjects' task, subjects' color perceptions were influenced by the shape category of an object. For example, objects that belonged to categories with redder objects were judged to be more red than identically colored objects belonging to another category. Further experiments showed that the object categories that subjects use, rather than being fixed, depend on the objects to which subjects are exposed.