Color processing in object verification.

Abstract

This study examined the effect of different object verification tasks on perceptual and conceptual color processing. Participants decided whether two successively presented stimuli (two pictures or a word then a picture) referred to the same object. Although the task did not require object-color processing, prototypical object-color was semantically activated and influenced verification decisions. This automatic conceptual color processing was more powerful than perceptual processing of the surface color presented in the picture. Moreover, conceptual color processing occurred in tasks involving only two pictures, implying that activation of prototypical color does not depend on verbal processing. Rather, activation of prototypical color depends on whether pictures are semantically encoded during verification, which in turn, occurs when verification cannot proceed from structural object information.