Modeling the emergence of universal categorization

The empirical evidence that human color categorization exhibits universal patterns beyond superficial discrepancies across different cultures has been a major breakthrough in the study of cognitive sciences. As observed in the World Color Survey (WCS), indeed, any two groups of individuals develop quite different categorization patterns, but some universal properties can be identified by a statistical analysis over a large number of populations. Here we reproduce the WCS in a numerical model where different populations independently develop their own categorization systems by playing elementary language games. The introduction of a simple perceptive constraint, namely the human Just Noticeable Difference (JND) as a function of wavelength, common to all humans, is sufficient to trigger the emergence of universal patterns, which unconstrained cultural interaction is unable to establish. We test the outcome of our experiment against real data by performing the same statistical analysis proposed to quantify the universal tendencies present in the WCS [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100(15): 9085-9089, 2003], and find an excellent quantitative agreement. Our work confirms that synthetic modeling has nowadays reached the maturity to contribute effectively to the ongoing debate in cognitive sciences.