Would it be better to be color vision deficient (CVD) or trichromatic when it comes to finding camouflaged objects? CVD is frequently seen as an impairment, but the prevalence of CVD in the human population leads us to question whether CVD could grant evolutionary advantage for survival – sometimes referred to as “dichromatic advantage”.  Striving for answers to these questions, the authors of this paper first categorize past studies into those that have found advantage for (i) dichromatic, (ii) trichromatic, and (iii) neither visual system, in terms of speed or accuracy at visual search tasks. Importantly, they highlight difficulties of generalizing from diverse experimental methodologies, ranging from non-human primates searching for colored items in an outdoor environment, to humans viewing geometrical (non-natural) objects or simulated dichromatic images on a computer display. Then, in the second part of the paper, they present empirical work aimed at tackling two gaps: testing different types of CVD human observers (instead of simulating CVD) and repeating similar tasks with different types of stimuli (artificial and naturalistic). Their direct comparison of trichromatic and CVD humans in the same experimental context finds best overall performance for trichromats.

---

---

 Add Comment

You must log in to add comments.