Introductory Remarks on Cognition, Culture, and Color Experience

Abstract

Color naming and categorization research has benefited from a diverse set of interdisciplinary researchers investigating a wide range of phenomena: from psychophysical studies of front-end physical processing in human visual systems, to the philosophical questions of the epistemology and ontology of color sensations, to investigations of the uniformity with which humans across the globe see, think, organize, and communicate about color stimuli in the world. Indeed, the impressive set of multidisciplinary contributions seen in the 1997 volume edited by Hardin & Maffi is consistent with the wide range of investigators who place the study of culture, cognition, and color categorization among their primary interests today. Research on color categorization and naming is particularly important to the study of culture and cross-cultural comparison because it represents one of the few areas of study that is both well defined as an area of multidisciplinary investigation and a relevant domain of psychological inquiry across human culture. The collection of articles presented in these two volumes represents viewpoints from this wide set of research interests. The range encompassed in these articles reflects the current state of