The influence of color-related knowledge in a chromatic discrimination task

The simulationist approach assumes the possibility of an interaction between access to knowledge in memory and perception. Indeed, the same perceptual representations and/or neural structures seem to be used. In this article, we test the possibility of such an interaction in the context of color perception, while overcoming the criticism made against previous works. Participants had to discriminate whether two colored circles, occurring simultaneously, were presented in the same color (yellow-yellow, green-green) or in different colors (yellow-green, green-yellow). Just before the targets were presented, a word associated with the colors yellow or green was briefly presented (e,g. artichokes, chick). The results show a decrease of response times when the color associated with the word matches the color of the two target circles. The priming effect observed here reinforces the simulationist hypothesis and is consistent with incorporated approaches of understanding and conceptualization.