Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Past studies reported that language-specific color focality hassubstantial influence on the short-term memory (STM) perfor-mance of colors of the speakers of the language, which we callthe ”focality effect.” This study attempts to clarify the contin-uous pattern of this effect, that is, the manner in which correctrecognition possibilities and misrecognition error distances ofcolors, which are two aspects of the STM performance for col-ors, change in a gradual fashion along the continuum of colorfocality. Our experiment, which tests the Japanese language,finds that a U-shaped relationship exists between the focalityand the possibility of correct recognition, and that the mis-recognition error distance increases as the focality decreases.We speculate that the subjects’ frequent and conscious employ-ment of the memorization strategy of coding colors using lin-guistic categories is one important cause of the detected effectpatterns.