Color categorization in infants

In human infants trichromatic vision is functional within the first few months of life. Infants also make categorical responses to color – appearing to group together similar colors, but with distinct boundaries. Recent developments have revealed a candidate neural basis for infant color categories – the low-level cone-opponent mechanisms of color vision. These pre-linguistic boundaries appear to drive infant looking behavior, and may provide discontinuity in color perception around which linguistic color categories are formed in adults. This finding opens up new avenues for research, such as the need to understand how color categorization develops from being based on the low-level mechanisms of color vision in infancy to reflecting the linguistic, cultural and visual environment of the individual.