Infant Color Categories

Although humans can discriminate millions of colors, language typically refers to color using a limited number of discrete categories (e.g., red, green, blue). Color categories are not only present in language (color terms), they are also present in “thought.” For example, at least under some circumstances, adults’ perceptual or cognitive judgments of color (e.g., color memory, search, or similarity judgments) are affected by whether colors come from the same or different linguistic color categories [see Hanley]. There has been considerable debate on the origin of color categories and on the extent to which color categories are arbitrarily constructed through language (see ref. [1] for review). To establish whether there is a nonlinguistic route to color categorization, prelinguistic infants’ response to color has been investigated. This has provided converging evidence that infants’ perceptual or cognitive judgments of color can also be affected by whether colors come from the same or different adult color categories. This suggests that color categories are present even in infancy and that even infants, on some level, can parse the continuum of color into discrete groups.