Color categories for red and blue in Serbian language

Categorical perception of colors (CPC) refers to the faster discrimination of colors that belong to different categories than colors within the same category. Here we investigated CPC in the Serbian language. Similar to Russian and Greek speakers, Serbian speakers distinguish lighter and darker blues. Serbian also has separate linguistic categories for dark and light red, which is very rare. Participants performed color discrimination tasks for blue and red conditions separately. This was followed by a naming task in which they had to put each presented color in one of the four color-categories (two blue, two red). We categorized trials as between- or within-category, relative to participant’s individual color boundaries. Participants were faster when discriminating between-category than within-category colors. This advantage was present only for physically similar shades while all physically distant shades were discriminated equally fast. Finally, discrimination was faster for reddish than bluish stimuli. CPC was demonstrated for language specific color categories in Serbian. Faster discrimination of red vs. blue targets, a novel finding, could be consistent with the hypothesis that trichromatic color vision is specialized for perception of blood-related modulation of skin appearance.