The relations between cognitive salience and color lexicons have been widely studied and yet results from existing research in this area are either lacking in explanatory scope or are methodologically unsound. The proposed research aims to fill a gap in the area and answer important questions for the general study of cognition and semantics. It is argued that the proposed work belongs to a larger class of research problems involving general issues of cognitive structure and category membership, and that the work also bears upon important practical applications. The proposed research will investigate relationships between color- semantics and cognitive salience by targeting four specific goals: (l) provide numerical mappings of color-appearance space that quantitatively define the cognitive mappings of 'best exemplars' for tested lexical labels. (2) determine if the mappings of exemplar regions vary across genders and across samples of tested populations. (3) determine the invariance properties (for both changes in paradigm and context) of these 'best exemplar' regions thereby providing a test of the validity of generalizing color-naming results from relatively simple viewing circumstances to situations that are contextually richer. And, (4) using unusually stringent methods, develop a base of normative empirical results that will serve as a foundation for modeling color-semantic and cognition behaviors. The proposed studies bring new empirical methodologies to this research issue (precise color-video stimuli and advanced paradigm designs), and new formal models for the analysis of data: the Batchelder- Bershad Rating system and the Romney-Batchelder Consensus Theory. These two models are powerful research advances for issues of cognition and color-semantics. Proposed experiments employ designs that will assess both cases of color-judgment in isolation and color-judgment in context. The empirical results will permit critical evaluation of both existing theory and findings. The research will generate normative data for several different linguistic populations (i.e. English, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean), and gender differences for each population. Results for these samples will be compared against existing results from similar linguistic populations and will serve as strong tests of existing color-semantic theories. Preliminary research in cognition and color theory presents alternative models to accepted theories, and pilot research suggests that the proposed studies are empirically feasible and promise informative results.
| Jameson, K A; Kaiwi, J L; Bamber, D (2001) Color coding information: assessing alternative coding systems using independent brightness and hue dimensions. J Exp Psychol Appl 7:112-28 |
