Colour appearance is affected not only by perceptual but also by linguistic context

Abstract

Terminology is a crucial problem in science, since quite often the terms used to denote theoretical concepts are directly taken from the vocabulary of common words, which usually have multiple meanings. To solve this problem, scientists must operationalize the theoretical concepts they use but, in psychology, sometimes, this can be a difficult task, since the meaning of the terms used to give the instructions to observers can interfere with the spontaneous meaning that observers give to those terms. Starting from some empirical observations, we show that colour appearance is affected not only by the perceptual but also by the linguistic context