Study of the product color´s image based on the event-related potentials

This research presents a new approach to explore the relationship between perception of product´s color and their image. Event-related potentials (ERP) are used to reveal the brain responds to variation of image words within the same color category. Sofa was used as an example in this study. Firstly, all of the sample sofa pictures were made in the warm color tone according to the HSB color space; Next, through a questionnaire survey, we deduced that the three adjective words to match the color in three degree are: (i) passionate, (ii)mild, (iii) refreshing. The evaluation result showed that the reaction time were shorter for Related (passionate) and Conflict words (mild) than for the Vague word (refreshing). P200 and N400 components were identified in the -100 to 600 ms interval by the repeated analysis. The P200 component was larger for the related condition than for the unrelated condition, in addition, a right anterior P200 effect was observed. Meanwhile, the N400 component can be elicited by both Vague word and Conflict word, which suggested that these two kinds of word were not match the image of the target color. These findings reveal that the ERP can identify the relationship between semantic and perception of color sensitively, therefore, can help designers in achieving a desirable image of product´s color effectively.