Practice in associating color-names with colors
Summary (1 min read)
DIRECTIONS FOR THE EXPERIMENT ON NAMING COLORS
- There are 4 typewritten lists of colors for each of the boards, and each list begins with the name of the color in one corner of the board, and gives the names of the colors in the order of their appearance on the board.
- Twenty-five, of whom fifteen were women, practiced on the 'light' colors.
- The table shows the average time required by the 45 subjects for naming the 100 colors and for reading aloud the 100 words.
- As a rule the first trial was better than the others except that on the first day, and to some extent on the The practice gains are shown both in seconds and in per cent.
THE SECOND EXPERIMENT
- It now seemed clear that the effects of previous practice do not afford a sufficient explanation of the difference in speed between color-naming and word-reading.
- Accordingly the problem was attacked from another quarter.
- The introspections of practically all of the students who had taken part in the first experiment agreed upon one point:.
- After the preliminary practice, which was only intended to bring the students to such a point that their speed for simple colors and lists of words would be nearly uniform from day to day, experiments were begun with sets of colors arranged just like the others except for words or letters typewritten upon them.
- The following transcript of the directions gives a sufficient outline of the course of this experiment.
DIRECTIONS
- Read the list of words beginning with brown: then read the simple color-set beginning with gray.
- Read the list of words beginning with gray: then the simple color-set beginning with pink.
- Then read color-set 16, with full words on all colors, two times.
- They are combined in the table so that wherever two records of the same kind were obtained on 1.
- It may be noted that the rate of improvement is here almost the same as in the earlier experiment in spite of the fact that the colors were practiced only three times and the words only once instead of four times as in the earlier experiment.
CONCLUSION
- No facts have been adduced to explain why more time is required to associate speech movements with a color than with the corresponding printed word.
- But the evidence does throw some light on the problem in so far as it eliminates very definitely two lines of explanation which have been thought possible.
- First, the phenomenon does not spring from a difference in the amount of practice which the two functions have had in the past.
- The two functions do not overlap, and in all probability they depend upon distinct physiological processes.
Did you find this useful? Give us your feedback
Citations
15,981 citations
5,172 citations
Cites background or methods from "Practice in associating color-names..."
...Using the arrows task, Clark and Brownell (1975) found subjects to be faster to identify which way an arrow was pointing (up or down) if it was located in the appropriate place in space (top or bottom, respectively). For letter identification in the presence of irrelevant letters, Taylor (1977) observed reliable facilitation as well....
[...]
...Brown (1915) and Ligon (1932) maintained that both tasks involved two processes but with a different association element for each test. Garrett and Lemmon (1924) held that color naming was longer because of an interference factor, which they failed to specify. Perhaps they had in mind what Peterson, Lanier, and Walker (1925) suggested: that many responses might be conditioned to a single color, but only one response was conditioned to a single...
[...]
...Brown (1915) predicted that ink-color naming would benefit from extended practice more than would color word reading because...
[...]
...Brown (1915) and Ligon (1932) maintained that both tasks involved two processes but with a different association element for each test. Garrett and Lemmon (1924) held that color naming was longer because of an interference factor, which they failed to specify....
[...]
...Clark and Brownell (1975) had subjects judge whether an arrow was pointing up or down inside a rectangle; White (1969) used the words north, south, east, and west inside a rectangle, and had subjects name the word's position....
[...]
1,923 citations
Cites background from "Practice in associating color-names..."
...In the context of the Stroop task, investigators have proposed that word reading is more highly practiced than color naming (Brown, 1915; MacLeod & Dunbar, 1988; Posner & Snyder, 1975)....
[...]
848 citations
701 citations