Exploring the categorical nature of colour perception: Insights from artificial networks

The electromagnetic spectrum of light from a rainbow is a continuous signal, yet we perceive it vividly in several distinct colour categories. The origins and underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon remain partly unexplained. We investigate categorical colour perception in artificial neural networks (ANNs) using the odd-one-out paradigm. In the first experiment, we compared unimodal vision networks (e.g., ImageNet object recognition) to multimodal vision-language models (e.g., CLIP text-image matching). Our results show that vision networks predict a significant portion of human data (approximately 80%), while vision-language models account for the remaining unexplained data, even in non-linguistic experiments. These findings suggest that categorical colour perception is a language-independent representation, though it is partly shaped by linguistic colour terms during its development. In the second experiment, we explored how the visual task influences the colour categories of an ANN by examining twenty-four Taskonomy networks. Our results indicate that human-like colour categories are task-dependent, predominantly emerging in semantic and 3D tasks, with a notable absence in low-level tasks. To explain this difference, we analysed kernel responses before the winner-takes-all stage, observing that networks with mismatching colour categories may still align in underlying continuous representations. Our findings quantify the dual influence of visual signals and linguistic factors in categorical colour perception and demonstrate the task-dependent nature of this phenomenon, suggesting that categorical colour perception emerges to facilitate certain visual tasks.