Abstract
Most fruits and other highly color-diagnostic objects have color as a central aspect of their identity, which can facilitate detection and visual recognition. It has been theorized that there may be a large amount of overlap between the neural representations of these objects and processing involved in color perception. In accordance with this theory we sought to determine if the recognition of highly color diagnostic fruit objects could be facilitated by the visual presentation of their known color associates. In two experiments we show that color associate priming is possible, but contingent upon multiple factors. Color priming was found to be maximally effective for the most highly color diagnostic fruits, when low spatial-frequency information was present in the image, and when determination of the object's specific identity, not merely its category, was required. These data illustrate the importance of color for determining the identity of certain objects, and support the theory that object knowledge involves sensory specific systems.
Highlights
Color can be highly informative of an object’s identity
A significant interaction was found between these three factors F (70, 700) = 1.51, p = 0.006, observed 12b = 1.00. This indicates that the removal of certain kinds of spatialfrequency information had a significant effect on the color primes’ ability to facilitate the recognition for the target objects
This study demonstrates the priming of object recognition using known color associates
Summary
Color can be highly informative of an object’s identity. most animals have some ability to perceive color, including mammals which typically have dichromatic color vision [1,2]. This evolution is theorized to have been driven by the color of tropical fruits [4,5,6], resulting in the development of a visual system especially well tuned to long wavelength colors (red, orange and yellow), which often signal the most nutritious fruit [7] These evolutionary theories of color vision have gained popularity and support in recent years, but typically make no attempt to explain contributions of higher-level cognitive processes, such as how an object’s color information is encoded, organized and recalled from memory. Studies using highly color-diagnostic objects have found that the addition of color information leads to greater facilitation for these objects when compared to those less linked to color [13,14,15,16] This color based facilitation appears to result in the activation of a more extensive neural network than colorless images, which makes object recognition faster [17]. These findings illustrate how object recognition can be facilitated by the color specific information stored within memory
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