Abstract
Some of recent researches have questioned the universality of basic color categories, and some of them argue that even the focal colors are not identical among people. In this paper, we investigated whether the focal colors chosen by different subjects were identical.
In this experiments, we first chose 1254 colors from the CIE1931XYZ color space as test stimuli. Subjects were asked to categorize those colors into one of the B&K's 11 basic color categories. Then, subjects were asked to choose “representative examples of the category” from all test colors of each category. Ten subjects with normal color vision were used. We plotted the distribution of the focal colors chosen by subjects in CIE L*a*b* space. As a result, we found that, in each category, focal colors were well lined up on a single line in CIE L*a*b* color space. The mean of multiple correlation coefficient, R, for focal colors in each category was 0.921129. We may propose the existence of perceptual basic color axes in basic color categories.