Color perception involves color representations firstly at a semantic level and then at a lexical level

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Color perception models often suggest an initial access to semantic representations.
• The role of knowledge and different representational levels (semantic vs. lexical) in color perception remains debated.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether knowledge, accessed through visual or lexical stimuli, influences color perception.
• To determine if color perception relies solely on semantic representations or involves other processing levels.

Main Methods:

• Participants performed a color discrimination task (yellow vs. green) preceded by either a line drawing or a word prime.
• Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was manipulated across two experiments to differentiate semantic and lexical processing.
• Response times and accuracy were measured to assess priming effects.

Main Results:

• Both image and word primes elicited a priming effect on color perception, contrary to initial hypotheses.
• Word primes resulted in slower response times, indicating an additional processing step.
• Manipulating SOA confirmed that lexical access contributes to priming, and an additional step occurs at the color perception level.

Conclusions:

• Color perception is influenced by both semantic and lexical knowledge.
• A new model is proposed where color perception involves sequential access to semantic and then lexical representations.
• This challenges the notion that color perception relies exclusively on semantic representations.