We perceive color everywhere and on everything that we encounter in daily life. Color science has progressed to the point where a great deal is known about the mechanics, evolution, and development of color vision, but less is known about the relation between color vision and psychology. However, color psychology is now a burgeoning, exciting area and this Handbook provides comprehensive coverage of emerging theory and research. Top scholars in the field provide rigorous overviews of work on color categorization, color symbolism and association, color preference, reciprocal relations between color perception and psychological functioning, and variations and deficiencies in color perception. The Handbook of Color Psychology seeks to facilitate cross-fertilization among researchers, both within and across disciplines and areas of research, and is an essential resource for anyone interested in color psychology in both theoretical and applied areas of study.

There is no colour without light, nor is there colour perception without a sensory organ and brain to process visual input. This book discusses the complex impact of colour action on the organism. It is shown that the perception of colour depends on the action of irritants on other sensor systems and, vice versa, the action of colour may exert exciting or inhibiting influence on the perception of sounds or smells. The mechanism of increasing realism of coloured images is also discussed, as well as the epistemic role of colour. Furthermore, this book examines whether there exist very large individual differences in the perception of colour, and if so how these differences manifest themselves. Other chapters in this book discuss the role of visual processing in the regulation of adaptive behaviours, a review of image denoising, and the role of colour in psychological functioning (i.e., the unconscious associations people have with colour that could act as possible confounds).

An experimental approach to the study and teaching of color is comprised of exercises in seeing color action and feeling color relatedness before arriving at color theory.

The 1969 publication of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's Basic Color Terms proved explosive and controversial. Contrary to the then-popular doctrine of random language variation, Berlin and Kay's multilingual study of color nomenclature indicated a cross-cultural and almost universal pattern in the selection of colors that received abstract names in each language. The ensuing debate helped reform the views of anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists alike. After four decades in print, Basic Color Terms now has a sequel: in this book, the authors authoritatively extend the original survey, studying 110 additional unwritten languages in detail and in situ. The results are presented with charts showing the overall palette of color terms within each language as well as the levels of agreement among speakers.

Awarded the 1986 Johnsonian Prize in Philosophy. This work on colour features a chapter, 'Further Thoughts: 1993', in which the author revisits the dispute between colour objectivists and subjectivists from the perspective of the ecology, genetics, and evolution of colour vision.

The science behind a good meal: all the sounds, sights, and tastes that make us like what we're eating—and want to eat more. Why do we consume 35 percent more food when eating with one other person, and 75 percent more when dining with three? How do we explain the fact that people who like strong coffee drink more of it under bright lighting? And why does green ketchup just not work? The answer is gastrophysics, the new area of sensory science pioneered by Oxford professor Charles Spence. Now he's stepping out of his lab to lift the lid on the entire eating experience—how the taste, the aroma, and our overall enjoyment of food are influenced by all of our senses, as well as by our mood and expectations. The pleasures of food lie mostly in the mind, not in the mouth. Get that straight and you can start to understand what really makes food enjoyable, stimulating, and, most important, memorable. Spence reveals in amusing detail the importance of all the “off the plate” elements of a meal: the weight of cutlery, the color of the plate, the background music, and much more. Whether we’re dining alone or at a dinner party, on a plane or in front of the TV, he reveals how to understand what we’re tasting and influence what others experience. This is accessible science at its best, fascinating to anyone in possession of an appetite. Crammed with discoveries about our everyday sensory lives, Gastrophysics is a book guaranteed to make you look at your plate in a whole new way.

A Naive Realist Theory of Colour defends the view that colours are mind-independent properties of things in the environment. Keith Allen argues that a naive realist theory of colour best explains how colours appear to perceiving subjects, and that this view is not undermined by our modern scientific understanding of the world.

A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language—and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water—a "she"—becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.

Starting from psychophysics, over the last 50 years, most progress in unravelling the mechanisms of color vision has been made through the study of single cell responses, mainly in LGN and striate cortex. A similar development in the study of form perception may seem to be underway, centred on the study of temporal cortex. However, because of the combinatorial characteristics of form perception, we are also observing the opposite tendency: from single-cell activity to population coding, and from static receptive field structures to system dynamics and integration and, ultimately, a synthetic form of psychophysics of color and form perception. From single cells to system integration: it is this development the present Research Topic wishes to highlight and promote. How does this development affect our views on the various attributes of perception? In particular, we are interested in to what extent evolving knowledge in the field of color perception is relevant within a developing integrative framework of form perception. The goal of this Research Topic is to bring together experimental research encompassing both color and form perception. For this volume, we planned a broad scope of topics – on color in complex scenes, color and form, as well as dynamic aspects of form perception. We expect that the Research Topic will be attractive to the community of researchers whose work straddles the boundary between the two visual perception fields, as well as to the wider community interested in integrative/systems neuroscience.