Variation of chromatic sensitivity across the life span

Abstract

Thresholds were measured along three directions in color space for detecting an equiluminant color change of a set of bars embedded in a larger field of spatio-temporal achromatic noise for observers ranging in age from 3 months to 86 years. Pre-verbal observers were assessed with a forced-choice preferential-looking technique while older observers responded orally or manually. Over the life span, thresholds could be described along each color axis tested by a curve with two trends. Thresholds decreased with each doubling of age by nearly a factor of two until adolescence. Thereafter, thresholds increased by a factor of 1.4-2 with each doubling of age. Sensitivity to chromatic differences varied similarly along all three axes tested, suggesting uniformity in the sensitivity of chromatic mechanisms across the life span.

Photopigment optical density of the human foveola and a paradoxical senescent increase outside the fovea

“…Because cone outer segment length decreases with retinal eccentricity (Polyak, 1941), photopigment OD is maximal in the foveola and decreases with eccentricity (Pokorny et al, 1976;Marcos et al, 1997). It is not known whether outer segment length varies with age, but a central question in this study was whether there are senescent changes in photopigment OD that may account for age-related losses in the sensitivity of M-and L-cone pathways (Werner et al, 2000;Knoblauch et al, 2001). Quantitative modeling indicates that much of the senescent loss in cone sensitivity is due to degradations that are mathematically equivalent to a loss in quantal efficiency and0or an elevation in neural noise (Schefrin et al, 1992(Schefrin et al, , 1995.…”

Ecological influences on individual differences in color preference

“…Although these changes could be due to maturational effects, this is unlikely, given the stability of color perception across the lifetime (Knoblauch, VitalDurand, & Barbur, 2001;Petzold & Sharpe, 1998;Roorda & Williams, 1999). Absolute chromatic sensitivities vary over the lifespan (e.g., Banks & Bennett, 1988), but psychophysical threshold measurements indicate that relative sensitivities along the three primary chromatic axes (protan, deutan, and tritan) change little, if at all, from the first 3-4 months of life to 86 years of age (Knoblauch et al, 2001). Other research on hue discrimination performance as a function of age found only slight differences between the ages of 4 and 25 years (Petzold & Sharpe, 1998).…”

Changes in color vision with decreasing light level: separating the effects of normal aging from disease

“…Red-green (RG) and yellow-blue (YB) mechanisms act independently at threshold [20], but it is generally believed that aging affects preferentially the YB mechanism [21,22]. Although several studies have shown that color vision deteriorates with advancing age [23,24], some controversy remains as to whether normal aging affects more the YB mechanism [25]. Diseases of the eye, such as diabetes, tend to affect uniformly both RG and YB mechanisms, although the loss of YB sensitivity precedes RG in early stage age-related macular degeneration [26].…”