Naming versus matching in color constancy

In this paper, a replication of the color-constancy study of Arend and Reeves (1986) is reported, and an alternative method is presented that can be used for the study of higher order aspects of color constancy, such as memory, familiarity, and perceptual organization. Besides a simultaneous presentation of standard and test illuminants, we also carried out an experiment in which the illuminants were presented successively. The results were similar to Arend and Reeves’s; however, in the object-matching condition of the successive experiment, we found an overestimation, instead of an underestimation, of the illuminant component. Because the results of matching experiments are difficult to interpret, mainly due to their sensitivity to instruction effects, we introduced another type of color-constancy task. In this task, subjects simply named the color of a simulated patch. It was found that, by applying such a task, a reliable measure of the degree of identification of object color can be obtained.