Richer color vocabulary is associated with better color memory but not color perception

The potential interaction between color naming and psychophysical color recognition has been historically debated. To study this interaction, here we utilized two approaches based on individual differences in color naming and variation of color name density along the color wheel. We tested a pool of Persian speaking subjects with a simple color matching task under two conditions: perceptual and memory-based matching. We also asked subjects to freely name 100 evenly sampled hues along the color wheel. We found that, individuals who possess more names to describe the color wheel have a strong edge in color memorization over those with fewer names. Nevertheless, having more or fewer color names was not related to the subjects' performance in perceptual color matching. We also calculated the density of color names along the color wheel and observed that parts of the color wheel with higher density of color names are held in memory more accurately. However, similar to the case of individual differences, the density of color names along the wheel did not show any correlation with perceptual color matching performance. Our results demonstrate a strong link between color naming and color memorization both across different individuals and different parts of the color wheel. These results also show that low-level perceptual color matching is not related to color naming, suggesting that the variation in color naming-among the individuals and across the color wheel-is neither the cause nor the effect of variation in low-level color perception.