Confidence Judgments on Color Category Best Exemplars

Abstract

Although basic color terms and basic color appearances have been shown to produce higher confidence ratings in a variety of naming and judgment tasks, our findings suggest that when different ethnolinguistic cultures are compared, higher confidence is not strictly linked to the basic foci of Berlin and Kay nor the centroid samples identified by Boynton and colleagues. This raises important questions about high confidence as evidence of the salience of basic color foci, a point central to the widely accepted basic color-term theoretical framework. This study analyzes confidence judgment data for Vietnamese and English color naming, suggesting that high confidence may be more directly linked to aspects of a task rather than universal focal color stimuli. Culture-specific patterns of naming, an individual’s access to shared cultural knowledge, and goodness of fit between exemplars and names provide a more complete explanation of the higher confidence observed for certain color appearances.