Effect and Its Time Course of Color and Color-word Cues on Color Categorization

Abstract

By using the pre-cueing paradigm, we investigated how perceptual and linguistic color information influences the following color categorization. The target colors in the experimental trials were to be judged by the observers as either red or green. There were four cue types, that is, perceptual-color, color nameword, congruently colored-word, and contradictorily colored-word. The cue was valid in half the trials and invalid in the rest. In two experiments cue duration and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) were differently manipulated. As a result, the color-word cue yielded reaction times that were similar to or shorter than the perceptual-color cue—this could be attributed to the automatic and faster linguistic processing. The difference in the cue effect became pronounced at 150ms or longer durations. Besides, the invalid cues inhibited performance. The cue validity’s effect decreased with SOA, which could be interpreted in terms of the property of visual attention.