The origin of color categories has been debated extensively. Linguistic relativists claim that color categories are shaped by the language we speak and that color terms subsequently affect our perception of color, while universalists postulate that color categories are independent of language and formed based on perceptual mechanisms. Our study adopted a sensitive frequency-tagging-based EEG paradigm where the color stimuli were presented sequentially at a fast speed of 10 Hz (SOA: 100 ms) to

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... obe fast, feedforward processing of color categories. We showed that EEG responses to cross-category oddball colors at the frequency where the oddball stimuli were presented was significantly larger than the responses to within-category oddball colors. This finding suggested that the categories of color stimuli were likely to be encoded automatically and in a feedforward manner, as the color stimuli were only briefly flashed and irrelevant to the task. The findings support the view that the categorical processing of color emerges at the early perceptual stage.