Psychophysical experiments were conducted in the UK, Taiwan, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Argentina, and Iran to assess colour emotion for two-colour combinations using semantic scales warm/cool, heavy/ light, active/passive, and like/dislike. A total of 223 observers participated, each presented with 190 colour pairs as the stimuli, shown individually on a cathode ray tube display. The results show consistent responses across cultures only for warm/cool, heavy/light, and active/passive. The like/dislike scale, however, showed some differences between the observer groups, in particular between the Argentinian responses and those obtained from the other observers. Factor analysis reveals that the Argentinian observers preferred passive colour pairs to active ones more than the other observers. In addition to the cultural difference in like/dislike, the experimental results show some effects of gender, professional background (design vs. nondesign), and age. Female observers were found to prefer colour pairs with high-lightness or lowchroma values more than their male counterparts. Observers with a design background liked low-chroma This article was published online on 12 November 2010. An error was subsequently identified in Table II. This notice is included in the online and print version to indicate that both have been corrected. *Correspondence to: Li-Chen Ou (e-mail: l.ou@leeds.ac.uk).Volume 37, Number 1, February 2012 23 colour pairs or those containing colours of similar hue more than nondesign observers. Older observers liked colour pairs with high-lightness or high-chroma values more than young observers did. Based on the findings, a two-level theory of colour emotion is proposed, in which warm/cool, heavy/light, and active/passive are identified as the reactive-level responses and like/dislike the reflective-level response.

Abstract. Germans and Chinese participated in letter recognition experiments based on the Sperling paradigm. They were instructed to report as many items as possible from a briefly exposed two-row matrix of letters from the Latin alphabet. In Experiment 1, the Germans performed better than the Chinese. In addition, a position effect was found in that participants correctly reported more letters from the first row than from the second row. In Experiment 2, the position effect was replicated even though the response mode prompted participants to report items from the bottom row first. In Experiment 3, the instruction as to how to allocate attention influenced the position effect. The performance lead of the Germans, as compared to the Chinese, was independent of these instructions. It is hypothesized that reading habits have influenced the allocation of attention and that language-specific encoding of the letters caused the differences in performance.

Abstract. German and Chinese students took part in four experiments. In Experiment 1, which was based on the Sperling paradigm, the participants were asked to report as many digits as possible from a briefly presented matrix. In contrast to previous experiments which had made use of Latin letters, the Chinese clearly outperformed the Germans this time. In Experiment 2, memory span for digits and Latin letters was measured. With Latin letters, the Germans achieved higher scores than the Chinese. The opposite was true for digit memory span. Taken together, the results indicate that performance in the Sperling task is not solely determined by encoding efficiency but also by rehearsal speed. In Experiment 3, the participants had to recognize only one item from briefly exposed stimulus displays. Besides Latin letters, language-specific stimuli were used consisting of combinations of letters for Germans and components of Chinese characters for Chinese. Based on the data from Experiment 3, two language-specific item sets comperable in terms of task difficulty, were chosen for use in the Sperling task in Experiment 4. Under these conditions, there was no significant difference in the overall level of performance between the two language groups. Performance was influenced, however, by the position of the items to be reported and this in a slightly different way in each language group. We discuss to what extent reading habits influenced the allocation of attention and adaptive processes caused differences in item recognition.