Recalibrating color categories using world knowledge
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Updated: Apr 2, 2026

Creating Objects and Object Categories for Studying Perception and Perceptual Learning
Published on: November 2, 2012
Holger Mitterer1, Jan Peter de Ruiter
1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. holger.mitterer@mpi.nl
Abstract:
When the perceptual system uses color to facilitate object recognition, it must solve the color-constancy problem: The light an object reflects to an observer's eyes confounds properties of the source of the illumination with the surface reflectance of the object. Information from the visual scene (bottom-up information) is insufficient to solve this problem. We show that observers use world knowledge about objects and their prototypical colors as a source of top-down information to improve color constancy. Specifically, observers use world knowledge to recalibrate their color categories. Our results also suggest that similar effects previously observed in language perception are the consequence of a general perceptual process.
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