Colour-concept association formation for novel concepts

ABSTRACT Colour-concept associations influence fundamental processes in cognition and perception, including object recognition and visual reasoning. To understand these effects, it is necessary to understand how colour-concept associations are formed. It is assumed that colour-concept associations are learned through experiences, but questions remain concerning how association formation is influenced by properties of the input and cognitive factors. We addressed these questions by first exposing participants to colour-concept co-occurrences for novel concepts (“Filk” and “Slub” alien species) using a category learning task. We then assessed colour-concept associations using an association rating task. During alien category learning, colour was a noisy cue and shape was 100% diagnostic of category membership, so participants could ignore colour to complete the task. Nonetheless, participants learned systematic colour-concept associations for “seen” colours during alien category learning and generalized to “unseen” colours as a function of colour distance from the seen colours (Experiment 1). Association formation not only depended on colour-concept co-occurrences during alien category learning, but also on cognitive structure of colour categories (e.g., degree to which an observed red colour is typical of the colour category “red”) (Experiment 2). Thus, environmental and cognitive factors combine to influence colour-concept associations formed from experiences in the world.