title: Color categories affect pre-attentive color perception.
abstract: Categorical perception (CP) of color is the faster and/or more accurate discrimination of colors from different categories than equivalently spaced colors from the same category. Here, we investigate whether color CP at early stages of chromatic processing is independent of top-down modulation from attention. A visual oddball task was employed where frequent and infrequent colored stimuli were either same- or different-category, with chromatic differences equated across conditions. Stimuli were presented peripheral to a central distractor task to elicit an event-related potential (ERP) known as the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN). The vMMN is an index of automatic and pre-attentive visual change detection arising from generating loci in visual cortices. The results revealed a greater vMMN for different-category than same-category change detection when stimuli appeared in the lower visual field, and an absence of attention-related ERP components. The findings provide the first clear evidence for an automatic and pre-attentive categorical code for color.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK. a.clifford@surrey.ac.uk
authors.forename: Alexandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Clifford
authors.forename: Amanda
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Holmes
authors.forename: Ian R L
authors.initials: IR
authors.lastname: Davies
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Franklin
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D003116:Color; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology