Remembering Color: How Do We Do It?

"How do we remember colors? What makes green... green?" asks the Medical News Today post. "As Sarah Allred explains, while color perception universally involves the practice of categorizing colors according to basic labels, the influence of categorization on color memory remains largely unknown and understudied. ...Thanks to Allred and her fellow researchers, these answers have just come sharper into hue. Allred and cognitive scientists Jonathan Flombaum of Johns Hopkins University, Gi-Yeul Bae of the University of California-Davis, and Maria Olkkonen of the University of Pennsylvania, shed light on the phenomenon of working color memory in their illuminating new study, 'Why Some Colors Appear More Memorable Than Others: A Model Combining Categories and Particulars in Color Working Memory,' published in the May issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology. In two pairs of experiments, the researchers used a set of 180 colors, spanning the entire color spectrum. In the first experiment pair, the researchers showed observers colors one at a time and asked them to categorize the colors according to eight basic color terms -- red, green, blue, purple, yellow, orange, brown, and pink." Read more.