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Cultural differences in basic color categorization or nomenclature have been variously explained by biological evolution, linguistic relativism, or semantic evolution. This paper reviews these theories and their implied philosophical antecedents. Furthermore, it brings recent ethological, electrophysiological, behavioral, and psychophysical data to bear on this formerly linguistic question. In both behavioral and psychophysical studies, natural categories of hue have been shown to exist in infrahuman species and in human infants and adults. The psychological salience of selected features of these hue categories in adult and infant humans has been found to correspond to neural functioning in brain. Moreover, recent psychophysiological evidence suggests that certain cultures may vary from a uniform pattern of categorization of basic hues because certain peoples may actually perceive colors differently and therefore categorize them differently.
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Marc H. Bornstein (1975) studied this question.
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