Electrophysiological Correlates of Processing Warning Signs With Different Background Colors: An Event-Related Potentials Investigation

Abstract

Warning signs, as a type of safety signs, are widely applied in our daily lives to informing people about potential hazards and prompting safe behavior. Although previous studies have paid attention to the color of warning signs, they are mostly based on surveys and behavioral experiments. The neural substrates underlying the perception of warning signs with different background colors remain not clearly characterized. Therefore, this research is intended to address this gap with event-related potentials (ERPs) technique. Warning signs with three different background colors (i.e., white, yellow, and blue) were used in the experiment. The results showed that the perceptual differences between different warning signs were present in the form of differential ERPs components (P1, N1, P2, N2, and P3) though subjects were not required to explicitly attend to the warning signs.

Exploring Perception of Warning Labels: Insights from Color, Signal Words, and Symbol Evaluation

“…Like the outcomes of this study, the US participants could not significantly distinguish between green, blue, and yellow. However, the results are similar to the outcomes reported in a study [25] where participants perceived blue as less prominent than yellow. Likewise, participants did not significantly differentiate between blue and green.…”

“…For example, studies in [22][23][24] discovered that participants rated the level of hazard for different colors, namely yellow, orange, and red, as increasing, which followed ANSI recommendations. Likewise, participants perceived yellow as more prominent than blue [25].…”