Color qualia—the subjective experience of color, such as the quality of redness—are similar across age and culture. Using a task that obtained pairwise similarity judgments via intuitive visual interfaces, researchers tested children aged 3 to 12 in Japan and 6 to 8 in China, comparing them with Japanese adults. About half of 3-year-olds completed the touch-panel task reliably. Despite developmental and cultural differences in color-term usage, color qualia structures were quite similar across all groups. This suggests that these structures emerge early in life. Subtle age-related differences in evaluations of some color pairs imply minor changes in color experience with development.
Visual consciousness—the transition from unconscious to conscious perception—emerges more slowly and gradually in 5–6-year-old preschoolers than in adults. Seventeen preschoolers and 16 adults completed color and category discrimination tasks at varying stimulus onset asynchronies. Objective accuracy and subjective awareness ratings were measured. Preschoolers showed significantly larger thresholds for both objective discrimination and subjective awareness, and their emergent processes were significantly more gradual, regardless of task type. Thus, young children require longer stimulus exposure to become consciously aware of colors and objects, and their transition to consciousness is less abrupt than in adults.