Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Opponent Colors Theory advances that four colors have special status and are yoked in opponent fashion (yellow-versus-blue, and red-versus-green). Classic hue cancelation studies provide evidence for this theory: people readily pick out colors that are neither red nor green, usually yellow. Here we conducted a version of a hue-cancelation experiment with the Tsimane’ people, a non-industrialized culture in the Amazon. Tsimane’ speakers readily identified reddish and greenish color chips, but they showed idiosyncratic choices when asked to identify a color that is neither reddish nor greenish, unlike English speakers who consistently select focal yellow. The Tsimane’ participants who also spoke Spanish and had a consistent label for English “yellow” (“amarillo”), performed similarly to the Tsimane’ monolinguals, suggesting that simply having a label for “yellow” is not sufficient to explain the consistency of English speakers. The results add to a growing body of evidence that does not support Opponent Colors Theory.