Evolutionary Game Theoretic Investigations into Color Category Evolution

100多年来，语言学家、人类学家和心理学家对颜色的分类进行了广泛的研究。它是跨文化、比较和历史研究的理想对象，因为人们很好地理解了颜色的生理过程，已经建立了感知颜色外观的心理学模型，有被接受的方法来测量颜色外观并将其分类用于工业用途，并且有大量的数据集，其中包括不同民族语言群体使用的各种语言来命名和分类颜色。这本大型跨学科文献包括一些长期存在的争议，其中最突出的是颜色命名系统在多大程度上基于生理过程的普遍方面(普遍性)与文化方面(相对主义)。普遍主义-相对主义问题之所以长期存在，一个原因是缺乏一种基于数学的方法来重建不断演变的颜色命名系统可能采取的可能路径。这一缺陷阻碍了对相关普遍性和相对主义机制作用的适当评估。该项目将继续研究人员的工作，开发一种适用于颜色命名研究中突出的理论和经验问题的方法，以演变颜色类别。特别是，将经济学进化博弈论的方法应用于心理色彩范畴的社会进化问题。该理论的核心是利用颜色术语的语义来有效地传递颜色信息，并根据信息的重要性进行加权。心理学从交际效果的角度制约使用何种语义，而文化则从文化重要性的角度制约使用何种语义。这项研究还考察了语义代码如何在包含肤色受损观察者亚群的群体中进化。(关于颜色命名的研究文献通常在数据收集和理论建模方面排除了这类受损的观察者，尽管也有一些例外。)这项研究还在工业上应用于涉及机器人群体的情况，这些机器人正在为它们之间的有效交流和有效地翻译成人类语言而发展语言分类方案。

The categorization of color has been extensively studied by linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists for more than 100 years. It is an ideal subject matter for cross-cultural, comparative, and historical studies because the physiological processing of color is well-understood, there are established psychological models of perceptual color appearances, there are accepted methods for measuring color appearances and cataloging them for industrial use, and there are large data sets that include a wide variety of languages used by various ethnolingusitic populations to name and classify colors. This large interdisciplinary literature includes a number of long-lasting controversies, the most prominent being the degree to which color naming systems are based on universal aspects of physiological processing (universalism) versus cultural aspects (relativism). One reason the universalism-relativism issue has been long-lasting is that there has been a lack of a mathematically based methodology to recreate the possible paths that evolving color naming systems may take. This deficiency obstructs appropriate evaluations of the roles of relevant universalist and relativist mechanisms.The project will continue the investigators' work developing a methodology for evolving color categories in manners that are applicable to outstanding theoretical and empirical issues in color naming research. In particular, methods of evolutionary game theory of economics will be applied to the problem of the social evolution of psychological color categories. The core of the theory is that the semantics of color terminology is used for the efficient transmission of color information weighted by the importance of the information. Psychology puts constraints on what semantics should be used in terms of communication efficacy and culture puts constraints on which semantics should be used in terms of cultural importance. The research also looks at how efficient semantic codes evolve in populations containing subpopulations of color impaired observers. (The research literature on color naming generally excludes this impaired class of observers in data collection and theoretical modeling, although there are a few exceptions.) The research also has industrial applications to situations involving colonies of robots evolving linguistic categorization schemes for efficient communication among themselves and for efficient translation into human languages.