Connotative

A type of Color Task, where an individual must understand implicit or explicit meaning of a color. For example:

• Associating the color red with “stop”.
• Associating blue with cold.
• Associating color with level of ripeness/doneness/freshness of a food.

The colorblind generally don’t have issues with connotative color tasks. However, almost all connotative color tasks first require a denotative color task, which can be difficult. For example, when determining whether a banana is ripe, a colorblind individual must first perform the denotative color task of determining whether the banana is green or yellow (generally hard), followed by the connotative color task of relating the color word to the color’s meaning (easy). Color normals may also use the color name as an intermediate step, but likely will jump straight from the observed color to the meaning.