Absolute judgments of colors using natural color names

Twenty Ss, 10 male and 10 female, were required to select from a list of 36 common color names the correct name for each of 36 Munsell colored chips. On their first trial, with no prior training and without even having seen the set of stimuli in advance, our Ss gave results that were as good as, or better than, previous Es have reported at the conclusion of much longer experiments. On the last trial (Trial 10) our Ss transmitted about 5.07 bits of information, corresponding to the perfect discrimination of more than 33 colors. These figures approach the upper limit possible with 36 colors (5.17 bits). Reasons are given to suggest that the so-called human “channel capacity” to tasks of this kind could be even greater than we found here.