“Points-of-View” analysis has been promoted as an appropriate analysis for similarity data collected with the Method of Sorting. It can be regarded as an extension of Cultural Consensus Analysis. The latter assumes that subjects all base their responses on a single shared ‘model’ of the items to be sorted. Conversely, the titular “points-of-view” are multiple models, sampled singularly by some subjects’ responses, while other subjects combine the models in various proportions. The analysis appears to be comparatively insensitive to the artefacts (...) to which sorting data are prone, which affect how easily they can be interpreted with multidimensional scaling. Here we apply the Points-of-View approach to two sets of data from the colour domain, a sensory modality well-suited for the sorting procedure. One study extracted three viewpoints – i.e., factors, prototypal ways of organising the stimuli – with one viewpoint specific to colour-vision-deficient observers, capturing independently-measured differences among the subjects. In the second study, two viewpoints proved to be appropriate: one arranged the items by two dimensions, lightness/saturation as well as hue, while the second was essentially a one-dimensional hue-based arrangement. This distinction could not be recovered from the raw data by applyingmdswith the weighted-Euclidean model of individual difference. We discuss some demographic factors which might dispose subjects to attend to hue only or saturation/lightness as well. (shrink)

This article addresses two questions related to colour categorization, to wit, the question what a colour category is, and the question how we identify colour categories. We reject both the relativist and universalist answers to these questions. Instead, we suggest that colour categories can be identified with the help of the criterion of psychological saliency, which can be operationalized by means of consistency and consensus measures. We further argue that colour categories can be defined as well-structured entities that optimally partition (...) colour space. We provide some empirical support for this claim by presenting experimental results, which indicate that internal structure is a better predictor of colour categories than perceptual saliency. (shrink)

These studies examined naming and free-sorting behavior by informants speaking a wide range of languages, from both industrialized and traditional cultures. Groups of informants, whose color vocabularies varied from 5 to 12 basic terms, were given an unconstrained color grouping task to investigate whether there are systematic differences between cultures in grouping behavior that mirror linguistic differences and, if there are not, what underlying principles might explain any universal tendencies. Despite large differences in color vocabulary, there were substantial similarities in (...) grouping behavior across language groups, and substantial within-language variation across informants. It seems that all informants group stimuli based on some criterion of perceptual similarity, but those with large color vocabularies are more likely to group stimuli in line with their basic color terms. The data are best accounted for by a hybrid system that combines a universal principle of grouping by similarity with culture-specific category salience. (shrink)