Simulating the Formation of Color Categories

This paper investigates the formation of color categories and color naming in a population of agents. The agents perceive and categorize color stimuli, and try to communicate about these perceived stimuli. While doing so they adapt their internal representations to be more successful at conveying color meaning in future interactions. The agents have no access to global information or to the representations of other agents; they only exchange word forms. The factors driving the population coherence are the shared environment and the interactions. The experiments show how agents can form a coherent lexicon of color terms and — particularly — how a coherent color categorization emerges through these linguistic interactions. The results are interpreted in the light of theories describing and explaining universal tendencies in human color categorization and color naming. At the same time, the experiments confirm aspects of the theories of Luc Steels [1997; 1998] who views language as a complex dynamic system, arising from self-organization and cultural interactions