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SUMMARY:The biological basis and perceptual impact of categorisation: the 
 case of colour. - Professor Anna Franklin\, The Sussex Colour Group\, Scho
 ol of Psychology\, University of Sussex
DTSTART:20170512T153000Z
DTEND:20170512T170000Z
UID:TALK71854@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Louise White
DESCRIPTION:The grouping of discriminable entities or sensations into cate
 gories provides essential structure for thought and language\, enabling ef
 ficiency in both cognition and communication.  The domain of colour has pr
 ovided a fertile testing ground for questions on how the human mind catego
 rises sensory continua\, and on the effect of categories on perception.  T
 here has been much debate about whether categorisation of the continuum of
  colour into categories such as red\, green\, blue is arbitrary or whether
  colour categories are determined by our visual system.  Variation in how 
 languages categorise colour (in colour lexicons) has been taken as evidenc
 e for the former hypothesis.  Several have also claimed that such linguist
 ic variation in colour categorisation causes speakers of different languag
 es to ‘see’ colour differently from each other.  In this talk I will p
 resent new evidence from our ERC funded ‘CATEGORIES’ project which cha
 llenges both of these arguments.  I will draw on experiments that use a di
 verse range of methods such as infant testing\, neuroimaging\, psychophysi
 cs\, cross-cultural fieldwork\, and experiments with colour vision deficie
 nt observers. I will present evidence which suggests that colour categorie
 s partly arise from the two neural subsystems responsible for early colour
  representation.  I will also present converging evidence that cultural va
 riation in how we talk about colour has minimal impact on the sensory and 
 perceptual stages of colour discrimination\, but that colour naming does r
 elate to other aspects of colour perception such as colour constancy and p
 reference.  \n\nBiography\nProfessor Anna Franklin is leader of The Sussex
  Colour Group (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/psychology/colour/) in the School o
 f Psychology at the University of Sussex.  She completed an Undergraduate 
 degree in Psychology at the University of Nottingham in 2000\, and a PhD o
 n colour perception at the University of Surrey in 2003.  Following an ESR
 C post-doctoral fellowship\, she took up a faculty position at the Univers
 ity of Surrey where she stayed until 2011.  In 2011 she spent a year as a 
 Visiting Scholar at the University of California Berkeley\, where she disc
 ussed and collaborated on research projects with eminent scientists from m
 ultiple disciplines such as vision scientist Professor Steve Palmer\, ling
 uist Professor Paul Kay and cognitive scientist Professor Terry Regier.  O
 n her return to the UK she took up a faculty position at the University of
  Sussex and established The Sussex Colour Group.  She was promoted to Prof
 essor in 2015.  The main aim of her research is to understand how we perce
 ive\, think and talk about colour. Her research draws on a diverse range o
 f methods to investigate this\, including experiments with infants\, neuro
 imaging methods and cross-cultural fieldwork.  She is a recipient of an ER
 C Starting Grant\, currently in its final year\, which aims to establish t
 he origin of colour categorisation\, and she also currently holds an ERC P
 roof of Concept grant which aims to develop a new test of colour vision de
 ficiency suitable for infants and young children.\n
LOCATION:Ground Floor Lecture Theatre\, Department of Psychology
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