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 categoris...

In this paper, we investigate a new paradigm for studying the development of the colour 'signal' by having observers discriminate and categorize the same set of controlled and calibrated cardinal coloured stimuli. Notably, in both tasks, each observer was free to decide whether two pairs of colors were the same or belonged to the same category. The use of the same stimulus set for both tasks pr...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a comprehensive categorisation of food scares. Design/methodology/approach – Following an initial desktop study, the categorisation was developed collaboratively with industry experts through a workshop and series of semi-structured interviews. Findings – The new categorisation developed is in Venn diagram format allowing ove...

Recent neuropsychological evidence, supporting a strong version of Whorfian principles of linguistic relativity, has reinvigorated debate about the role of language in colour categorisation. This paper questions the methodology used in this research and uses a novel approach to examine the unique contribution of language to categorisation behaviour. Results of three investigations are reported....

Recent studies suggest that high-frequency words may benefit speech segmentation (Bortfeld, Morgan, Golinkoff, & Rathbun, 2005) and grammatical categorisation (Monaghan, Christiansen, & Chater, 2007). To date, these tasks have been examined separately, but not together. We familiarised adults with continuous speech comprising repetitions of target words, and compared learning to a language in w...

In an attempt to understand how low-level visual information contributes to object categorisation, previous studies have examined the effects of spatially filtering images on object recognition at different levels of abstraction. Here, the quantitative thresholds for object categorisation at the basic and subordinate levels are determined by using a combination of the method of adjustment and a...