Influence of Color on Perceptual Priming: A Picture Fragment Completion Paradigm

The role of color in perceptual priming still remains unclear. We investigated the influence of color during the identification of natural images using a perceptual priming paradigm. In a learning phase, two groups of participants were presented with either colored or gray-scaled variants of photos. A control group did not participate in the learning phase. We measured the level of fragmentation by which a stimulus was correctly recognized in a retrieval phase. Results indicate that colored (compared to gray-scaled) stimuli improved subsequent identification performance of colored and gray-scaled stimuli. These findings imply that color enhances the effects of perceptual priming.