plot(xdata{:}, ydata{:})
is equivalent of
plot(xdata{1}, xdata{2}, ydata{1}, ydata{2})
which is going to treat the data as pairs and plot xdata{1} against xdata{2}, and plot ydata{1} against ydata{2}
To do it right you would need something like
xydata = [xdata; ydata];
plot(xydata{:})
Also
plot(xdata{:}, ydata{:}, 'color', cdata{:})
Would be treated as
plot(xdata{1}, xdata{2}, ydata{1}, ydata{2}, 'color', cdata{1}, cdata{2})
which would fail because cdata{2} is not the name of a valid named option.
Is there any way to assign additional information to the information being plotted using plot() such as color, or line style?
No. For any one plot() call, if you specify multiple name/value pairs with the same name, then it is the last pair that is used.
Although you could construct
cdata = [cellstr(repmat('color', length(xdata), 1)), {c1; c2}];
plot(xydata{:}, cdata{:})
to get the effect of
plot(xdata{1}, xdata{2}, ydata{1}, ydata{2}, 'color', c1, 'color', c2)
because of the rules around last-processed option, this would be equivalent to
plot(xdata{1}, xdata{2}, ydata{1}, ydata{2}, 'color', c2)
and the c1 color information would be ignored.
What you can do is
h = plot(xydata{:});
cdata = {c1 c2};
set(h, {'color'}, cdata(:))
This takes advantage of a special syntax of set(), that if you provide a cell array of a property name, then the property name will be effectively duplicated once for each handle and the corresponding cdata value will be used
