Category or diagnosticity effect?: the influence of color in picture naming tasks

Abstract

The category effect has largely been studied in picture naming tasks. Introducing color to pictures leads to an improvement in responses, but the effect is not homogeneous for all items. Some authors have reported that living categories show a larger improvement, whereas others sustain that color diagnosticity is the key factor . the aim of the current article is to study the impact of both factors by comparing the performance of healthy participants in a picture naming task in both color and black-and-white conditions. Three diagnosticity measures were calculated: 2 of them were extracted from an objective measure, semantic feature production norms, and another was calculated through a subjective measure. Results showed that this last measure, diagnosticity mode, has an impact on response accuracy but not on response time (RT), whereas a category effect was not found. Furthermore, name agreement and typicality were the variables that produced a larger impact on RT. Consequently, the results lead to the conclusion that color diagnosticity seems to be responsible for the differences observed between conditions.