Understanding the origins of colour categories through computational modelling

Human colour perception is continuous, but humans categorise the colour continuum and often label the resulting colour categories. The debate on whether colour categorisation is an individual process, or whether it is embedded in genetic constraints has not been settled yet. Furthermore, as colour categories have colour names, it is claimed that language could have an influence on the categorisation. This paper reports on agent-based simulations that test the validity of different theories, and uncovers the weak and strong points of each. We conclude, from experiments using AI techniques, that colour categorisation is most likely to be cultural process.