Cognitive Entrenchment of Color Category and Implicit Attitudes in English

This paper discusses the results of a novel application of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to linguistic categorization of color and cognitive semantics of English. The IAT is an experimental paradigm developed by Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz (1998) to study the strength of concept associations in memory, and to explore the unconscious roots of thinking and feeling. I demonstrate how the IAT may also be employed to reveal a participant’s conceptual default attitude toward a given color category. The paradigm establishes a double discrimination task that maps four categories onto two responses. Results of IATs show how English speakers activate parallel processing to categorize attributes of pleasantness and distance with color dimension targets: e.g. is red or green associated more easily with pleasant, and is near or far associated more easily with light? This innovative use of the IAT test illustrates the variation of cognitive entrenchment of color relations according to a specific association.