This report surveys cognitive aspects of color in terms of behavioral, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological data. Color is usually defined as a color stimulus or as perceived color. In this article, a definition of the concept of cognitive color is formulated. To elucidate this concept, those visual tasks are described where it is relevant: in color categorization, color coding, color naming, the Stroop effect, spatial organization of colored visual objects, visual search, and color memory. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 29, 7–19, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.10209

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This report surveys cognitive aspects of color in terms of behavioral, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological data. Color is usually defined as psychophysical color or as perceived color. Behavioral data on categorical color perception, absolute judgement of colors, color coding, visual search, and visual awareness refer to the more cognitive aspects of color. These are of major importance in visual synthesis and spatial organization, as already shown by the Gestalt psychologists. Neuropsychological and neurophysiological findings provide evidence for an interrelation between cognitive color and spatial organization. Color also enhances planning strategies, as has been shown by studies on color and eye movements. Memory colors and the colorlanguage connections in the brain also belong among the cognitive aspects of color.

Used as a redundant code, color is shown to be advantegeous in visual search tasks. It enhances attention, detection and recall of information. Color has long been used in carthography to enhance visual synthesis ad spatial organization. Neuropsychological and neurophysiological findings have shown color and spatial perception to be interrelatedfunctions. Studies on eye movements show that colored symbols are easier to detectand that eye fixations are more correctly directed to color-coded symbols. Usually between 5 and 1 5 colors have been found useful in classification tasks, but this number can be increased to between 20 to 30 by careful selection of colors, and by a subject's practice with the identification task and familiarity with the particular colors. Because of the known intricacy of the color-language connection in the brain, the selection of optimal color codes for visual displays, for visualization, for maps, etc., the colors should incorporate the relationship between the perceptive, cognitive and linguistic aspects of color.Recent neurophysiological findings concerning the language-concept connection in color suggest that color concept retrieval would be enhanced by free color naming or by the use of natural associations between color concepts and color words. To test this hypothesis, we had subjects give their own free associations to a set of 35 colors presented on a display. They were able to identify as many as 30 colors without training.