HUE MEMORY AND DISCRIMINATION IN YOUNG-CHILDREN

As first remarked by Charles Darwin (1877), very young children freque ntly have difficulty when naming or choosing colors. To investigate th e cause of this difficulty, we have tested preschoolers (mean age = 4. 1) for hue discrimination and hue memory and compared their results wi th those of preadolescents (mean age = 9.6) and young adults (mean age = 25.8). The tests were designed to minimize the influence of verbal coding on the results. We find that preschoolers are as good as the tw o older groups in hue discrimination. However, in visual hue memory, t hey are significantly poorer. The 3-fold increased errors they make, r elative to preadolescents and young adults, may be related to the deve lopment of visual hue categories and the integration of verbal and vis ual processes. However, such errors cannot explain why young children often experience extreme difficulty in color naming. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.