A. Kimball Romney

Research Professor of Anthropology (PhD: Harvard, 1956)
2139 Social Sciences Plaza A
(949) 824-3733
email: akromney at uci dot edu

Professor Romney's curriculum vitae

Please click here for Prof. Romney's web page at the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences.

Professor Romney's recent research has focused on human color vision ranging from cross-cultural studies of color perception to representing physical reflectance spectra in low dimensional Euclidean space (selected items available in pdf format below). Other research interests include comparative cognitive studies of semantic structures, the measurement of cultural knowledge using culture consensus theory, and multidimensional scaling. He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1956-57. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Romney's interests center on culture, cognitive anthropology, history of science, and methodology. Theory can be no better than the methods and findings upon which it is based. He searches for universal generalizations that are objectively verifiable and can be replicated using publicly available techniques.

Selected Publications

Romney, A. Kimball, Roy G. D'Andrade, and Tarow Indow. 2005.
The distribution of response spectra in the lateral geniculate nucleus compared with reflectance spectra of Munsell color chips. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 102:9720-9725. For commentary on this see A Different Point of Hue.

Romney, A. K. and T. Indow. 2003.
Munsell reflectance spectra represented in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Color Research and Application. 28:182-196.

D'Andrade, R. G. and A. K. Romney. 2003.
A quantitative model for transforming reflectance spectra into the Munsell color space using cone sensitivity functions and opponent process weights. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 100:6281-6286.

Moore, C. C., A. K. Romney, and T. Hsia. 2002.
Cultural, gender, and individual differences in perceptual and semantic structures of basic colors in Chinese and English. Journal of Cognition and Culture. 2:1-28.

Romney, A. Kimball and Tarow Indow. 2002.
A model for the simultaneous analysis of reflectance spectra and basis factors of Munsell color samples under D65 illumination in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 99:11543-11546.

Romney, A. Kimball and Tarow Indow. 2002.
Estimating munsell reflectancer spectra from cone sensitivities or human color matching functions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 99:14607-14610.

Romney, A. K., C. C. Moore, W. H. Batchelder, and T. Hsia. 2000.
Statistical Methods for Characterizing Similarities and Differences between Semantic Domains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 97:518-523.

Moore, C. C., A. K. Romney, and T. Hsia. 2000.
Shared cognitive representations of perceptual and semantic structures of basic colors in Chinese and English. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 97:5007-5010.

"Culture as Shared Cognitive Representations."
(with John P. Boyd, Carmella C. Moore, William H. Batchelder, and Timothy J. Brazill.) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93 (1996): 4699-4705.

"Cultural universals: measuring the semantic structure of emotion terms in English and Japanese." (with, Carmella C. Moore and Craig D. Rusch.) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 94 (1997): 5489-5494.

"Correspondence analysis as a multidimensional scaling technique for non-frequency similarity matrices." (with Carmella C. Moore and Timothy J. Brazill.) Visualization of Categorical Data. Eds. Joerg Blasius and Michael Greenacre. San Diego: Academic Press, 1998. 329-345.

"Cultural consensus as a statistical model." Current Anthropology.

"Toward a theory of culture as shared cognitive structures."
Ethos 26 (1998): 314-337.