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Updated: Mar 1, 2026

Visualizing Visual Adaptation
Published on: April 24, 2017
Colour categories are reflected in sensory stages of colour perception when stimulus issues are resolved
Lewis Forder1, Xun He2, Anna Franklin1
1The Sussex Colour Group, School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
Debate exists about the time course of the effect of colour categories on visual processing. We investigated the effect of colour categories for two groups who differed in whether they categorised a blue-green boundary colour as the same- or different-category to a reliably-named blue colour and a reliably-named green colour. Colour differences were equated in just-noticeable differences to be equally discriminable. We analysed event-related potentials for these colours elicited on a passive visual oddball task and investigated the time course of categorical effects on colour processing. Support for category effects was found 100 ms after stimulus onset, and over frontal sites around 250 ms, suggesting that colour naming affects both early sensory and later stages of chromatic processing.
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