Coloured thinking

Charles Myers became one of the founding fathers of British psychology (see Costall, 1998) as a result of going on an expedition to the Torres Straits (off New Guinea) organised from Cambridge University. As Richards (1998) wrote, ‘for Myers the Expedition was an epochal experience, deciding him on a psychological career’. However, it is interesting to note the different outcome of that expedition for Myers (and also for Rivers, one of the founders of the BPS) compared with that for McDougall (also a founder of the BPS). McDougall, and hence perhaps his pupil Cyril Burt, saw evidence in their data for the genetic determination of cross-cultural cognitive differences. Myers, and hence perhaps his pupil Frederic Bartlett, saw the methodological impossibility of satisfactorily transferring experimental psychology from the laboratory to the field. Myers realised that their data were unreliable. As Richards wrote of the published work from the expedition, ‘the Reports thus became a virtuoso exercise in the art of writing up unsatisfactory research as positively as possible short of outright dissembling’ (p.145)

Language impairment and colour categories

Goldstein (1948) reported multiple cases of failure to categorise colours in patients that he termed amnesic or anomic aphasics. these patients have a particular difficulty in producing perceptual categories in the absence of other aphasic impairments. we hold that neuropsychological evidence supports the view that the task of colour categorisation is logically impossible without labels

Priming of Depth-Rotated Objects Depends on Attention and Part Changes

Three priming experiments investigated the role of attention and view changes when common objects were rotated in depth. Objects were shown in prime-probe trial pairs. Experiment 1 extended findings by Stankiewicz, Hummel, and Cooper (1998) showing that attended objects primed themselves in the same but not in a reflected view, whereas ignored objects only primed themselves in the same view. In Experiment 2, depth-rotations produced changes in the visible part structure between prime and probe view of an object. Priming after depth-rotation was more reduced for attended objects than for ignored objects. Experiment 3 showed that other depth rotations that did not change the perceived part structure revealed a priming pattern similar to that in Experiment 1, with equivalent reduction in priming for attended and ignored objects. These data indicate that recognition of attended objects is mediated by a part-based (analytic) representation together with a view-based (holistic) representation, whereas ignored images are recognized in a strictly view-dependent fashion

Preserved thematic and impaired taxonomic categorisation: a case study

The present paper seeks to understand more about categorisation and its relation to naming. A patient with language impairments (LEW) was examined in a three-part investigation of his ability to make classification decisions. The first part demonstrated LEW's inability to make taxonomic classifications of shape thus confirming his previously documented impaired perceptual categorisation. The second part demonstrated that, despite LEW's inability to perform simple taxonomic classifications, he could reason analogically as well as a 4/5 year-old child. It is therefore argued that taxonomic classifications cannot be driven by the development of analogical reasoning. The third part more directly contrasted thematic and taxonomic classification. LEW showed a preference for thematic classification. In fact, there was no evidence of any substantial ability to make taxonomic colour classifications despite evidence for good preservation of the associated object-colour knowledge

Categorical perception of animal patterns

As part of the more general issue of whether culture can affect perception, the present paper addresses the Whorfian question of whether the language available to describe perceptual experience can influence the experience itself. It investigated the effect of vocabulary on perceptual classification by the study of a remote culture (Himba) which possesses a poor colour vocabulary but a rich vocabulary of animal pattern terms. Thus, the present study examined Categorical Perception (CP) with a type of visual stimulus not previously used to assess the effect of labels on perceptual judgments. For the animal patterns, the Whorfian view predicted that it would only be the Himba who showed superiority for cross-category decisions as only they have the appropriate labels. The Whorfian view was upheld and confirmed previous findings that linked perceptual differences to labelling differences

Two types of thought: Evidence from aphasia

Evidence from aphasia is considered that leads to a distinction between abstract and concrete thought processes and hence for a distinction between rules and similarity. It is argued that perceptual classification is inherently a rule-following procedure and these rules are unable to be followed when a patient has difficulty with name comprehension and retrieval

Augmenting a colour lexicon

Languages differ markedly in the number of colour terms in their lexicons. The Himba, for example, a remote culture in Namibia, were reported in 2005 to have only a 5-colour term language. We re-examined their colour naming using a novel computer-based method drawing colours from across the gamut rather than only from the saturated shell of colour space that is the norm in cross-cultural colour research. Measuring confidence in communication, the Himba now have seven terms, or more properly categories, that are independent of other colour terms. Thus, we report the first augmentation of major terms, namely green and brown, to a colour lexicon in any language. A critical examination of supervised and unsupervised machine-learning approaches across the two datasets collected at different periods shows that perceptual mechanisms can, at most, only to some extent explain colour category formation and that cultural factors, such as linguistic similarity are the critical driving force for augmenting colour terms and effective colour communication

Local and global processing. Observations from a remote culture

In Experiment 1, a normal adult population drawn from a remote culture (Himba) in northern Namibia made similarity matches to [Navon, D. (1977). Forest before trees: The precedence of global features in visual perception. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 353–383] hierarchical figures. The Himba showed a local bias stronger than that has been previously observed in any other non-clinical human population. However, in Experiment 2, their recognition of normal or distorted (“Thatcherized”) faces did not appear to have been affected by their attention to detail as has been suggested for autistic populations. The data are consistent with a cultural/experiential origin for population differences in local processing and suggest that attention to the local and global properties of stimuli may differ for hierarchical figures and faces