Warm versus cool colors and their relation to color perception

The distinction between warm and cool colors is widely considered a fundamental aspect of human color experience, but whether it reflects properties of color perception or color associations remains unclear. We examined how the warm-cool division is related to perceptual landmarks of color coding and color appearance. Observers made warm-cool ratings for 36 hue angles at three luminance levels and also estimated the angles for their unique (e.g., yellow or red) and binary (e.g., orange) hues. The warm-cool dimension was reliably identified by most observers, was consistent across lightness levels, and varied along an orangish-red to greenish-blue dimension that is intermediate to both the principal chromatic dimensions of early cone-opponent (cardinal) or perceptual-opponent (red-green and blue-yellow) axes. When the stimuli were projected into a uniform color space (CIELAB), a close correspondence was found between the warm-cool dimension and the perceived strength (saturation) of different hues, based on the LAB chroma. Specifically, the peak warm and cool values were hue angles with the weakest saturation, and the boundaries between the two categories corresponded to hue angles with the highest saturation. This pattern could arise if vision is selectively adapted to the spectra of warm and cool colors and provides a potential basis for the strong but unexplained asymmetries in color coding built into perceptually uniform color spaces.