• Corpus ID: 16399684

Understanding the origins of colour categories through computational modelling

@inproceedings{Belpaeme2002UnderstandingTO,
  title={Understanding the origins of colour categories through computational modelling},
  author={Tony Belpaeme},
  year={2002}
}

• Tony Belpaeme
• Published 2002
• Mathematics

AbstractHuman colour perception is continuous, but humans categorise thecolour continuum and often label the resulting colour categories. The de-bate on whether colour categorisation is an individual process, or whetherit is embedded in genetic constraints has not been settled yet. Further-more, as colour categories have colour names, it is claimed that languagecould have an inuence on the categorisation. This paper reports onagent-based simulations that test the validity of di erent theories, anduncovers the weak and strong points of each. We conclude, from experi-ments using AI techniques, that colour categorisation is most likely to becultural process. 1 Introduction The chromatic perception of our environment is continuous, and we can dis-tinguish millions of di erent colours. Nevertheless, we attach more importanceto some colours than to others by cutting up the colour continuum into colourcategories. Perceived colours can have a degree of membership to colour cate-gories, the colour of a tomato for example has a high degree of membership forthe RED category, but not so much for the PURPLE category and even less forthe BLUE category. It is agreed that humans categorise the colour continuum,and that the categories can be labelled (e.g. the RED category is labelled \red"in English and \rouge" in French). We also assume that colour categories havea prototypical nature (Rosch et al., 1976), meaning they have a degree of mem-bership which is maximal for one or more prototypical colours, and a gracefullydecreasing degree of membership for others colours.Although scholars largely agree on the nature of colour categories, the de-bate on the origins of colour categories has been raging for almost a century