Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While individual differences have been found in many aspects of color perception, it is unclear whether mental representations of color vary between individuals in a structured way. To test for structured variability, we collected perceptual similarity judgments for 58 colors in a triadic-comparisons procedure, and from each participant's judgments, embedded the colors into a personalized three-dimensional space. The personalized embedding predicted a participant's similarity judgments on held-out items significantly better than did (a) embeddings from other participants, suggesting reliable individual differences in perceived color similarity (p < 0.0001), and (b) color coordinates in a standardized perceptual color space (CIELAB; p < 0.0005). Across individuals, embedding structure did not vary randomly but fell into two clusters, one encompassing more distinct color categories and the other a more continuous perceptual space. The results suggest the existence of previously unrecognized "motifs" in how people represent colors.