Digital color design lacks scientific guidance beyond designer intuition, limiting cultural product effectiveness. This study develops a cognitive hierarchy framework integrating feature integration, ecological perception, and cultural semiotics theories to quantify ACG color cognition through network analysis. Analyzing 38,566 social media posts, three-layer semantic networks (perceptual, associative, symbolic) reveal systematic structural differences with"scale reduction-power concentration"patterns. Network position demonstrates strong association with propagation effects: perceptual layer PageRank correlates with frequency at r = 0.991 (p = 5.78e-200), explaining cognitive simplicity's transmission advantage. Cross-layer coupling identifies 1709 bridging nodes (colors that connect different network communities) with gradient connection strengths validating spreading activation theory in collective cognition. High-propagation colors exhibit significant centrality advantages, confirming structural position's decisive role. This represents the operationalized conversion from cognitive psychology to complex network analysis, establishing data-driven foundations for cultural communication design strategies.
Zhao et al. (Fri,) studied this question.