A novel method for quantifying color concept saliency

Authors

Marcelo Fernandes Costa^1,2*, Carlo Martins Gaddi², Fraulein Vidigal de Paula³

¹ Departamento de Psicologia Experimental, Instituto de Psicologia, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
² Núcleo de Neurociências e Comportamento e Neurociências Aplicada, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
³ Departamento de Psicologia da Aprendizagem, do Desenvolvimento e da Personalidade, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

Our study aimed to present a new method to generate a scale for colors concept distances using the Law of Comparative Judgment and derivate an interval scale for the amount of color concept salience. A hundred twenty-two participants (mean age = 22.3 years; SD = 1.7) with normal visual acuity and color vision were evaluated. The task consisted of writing a list of the one-term word for colors and data were analyzed based on Thurstone’s rank order scaling method. The most salient concept was blue and the less was violet with a distance for concepts of 3.51 units between them. The internal consistency of our measurement was lower than .1% for almost colors which suggests high reliability. Thus, our innovative approach produces quantitative interval class data rather than categorical or ordinal data allowing quantitative measurement of the amount of the concept salience on a unidimensional scale.

Keywords: conceptual knowledge, Law of Comparative Judgment, color concept, psychophysical scaling, interval scaling method

PAGES:213-234

doi:10.24193/cbb.2020.24.12

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