Explaining Universal Color Categories Through a Constrained Acquisition Process

Abstract

Color categories enjoy a special status among human perceptual categories as they exhibit a remarkable cross-cultural similarity. Many scholars have explained this universal character as being the result of an innate representation or an innate developmental program which all humans share. We will critically assess the available evidence, which is at best controversial, and we will suggest an alternative account for the universality of color categories based on linguistic transmission constrained by universal biases. We introduce a computational model to test our hypothesis and present results. These show that indeed the cultural acquisition of color categories together with mild constraints on the perception and categorical representation result in categories that have a distribution similar to human color categories.

Statistical physics of language dynamics

“…Here we present the so-called Category Game, a scheme where an assembly of individuals with basic communication rules and without any external supervision may evolve an initially empty set of categories, achieving a non-trivial communication system. The Category Game is a minimal model for linguistic categorization [53,54,55,56,57,25,58,59,60,61], which is a more complex activity than naming a single object. In the spirit of reducing the rich spectrum of linguistic phenomena to essential aspects, prone to mathematical or numerical modeling, here we consider linguistic categorization as the elaboration of a map between a large set of perceptions or concepts and a small set of linguistic labels, typically nouns or attributes [62].…”

Integration of Action and Language Knowledge: A Roadmap for Developmental Robotics

“…This is known as extended symbol grounding [17]. The cultural acquisition of categories has been explored in simulation and robotic environments (see, for example, Steels, [227] and Vogt, [254]) and close parallels have been noted between simulated cultural learning of words and categories and human category acquisition [16], [230]. However, while extended symbol grounding has not been explored in environments involving both humans and robots (although see Roy, [201] and Seabra Lopes and Chauhan, [213]), this offers an exciting opportunity for cognitive systems research, with a possible impact on other disciplines, such as semantic web research and information search technology.…”

Evolutionary Models of Color Categorization Based on Discrimination

“…The modeling methods used here resemble those found in existing research on the evolution of general communication and signaling systems (Grice 1957, 1989, Lewis 1969, Skyrms 1996, 2002, Komarova & Niyogi 2004, Komarova 2004 and from computational modeling specific to perceptually-based color categorization (Zuidema & Westernann 2003, Belpaeme & Bleys 2005, Steels & Belpaeme 2005.…”

“…Similar to previous color category simulation research we examine how individual agents behave in color discrimination games and how groups of agents interact in language games under different constraints, allowing a shared lexicon to emerge and stabilize across simulated communication games among a population of agents (Belpaeme & Bleys 2005, Steels & Belpaeme 2005.…”