Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A key characteristic of color perception is that it both categorical and continuous. This is reflected in graded color ad-jective use. This red fruit is redder than the other red fruit sounds more natural than this red fruit is redder than the bluefruit (Kennedy & McNally, 2010). We examined the contribution of first-person sensory experience to color gradabilityunderstanding by working with congenitally blind adults. Blind (n=20) and sighted (n=15) adults rated the naturalness ofstatements describing two objects of the same color (two red mugs), dissimilar colors (red mug, blue mug) or similar col-ors (red mug, purple mug). Both groups judged redder as most natural for two red objects, least for objects with differentcolors (red/blue) and intermediate for objects with similar colors (red/purple). Color similarity had a larger effect for thesighted group. Understanding color gradability does not require first-person perception.