Red-green color deficient vision loses little information from natural scenes

What is it about?

Inherited red-green color vision deficiency affects around one in twelve European males. Previous studies have focused on its effects in particular tasks such as primitive foraging, detecting blushing, and breaking camouflage. But how they relate to real-world vision is unclear. Here the general impact of color vision deficiency was estimated by computing the information available to affected observers viewing natural scenes. Results suggest that the information is only a little less than in normal trichromatic vision.

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Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash

Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The difficulty with using specific tasks to assess color vision deficiency is that there is no straightforward way to decide on their relative importance – and on any selective genetic pressure they may exert. By contrast, computing the total color information available reveals the limited impact of red-green color vision deficiency in natural scenes. More detailed analysis also indicates that this is due mainly to these scenes containing much greater lightness variations than chromatic variations.