2000 Volume 84 Issue 2 Pages 107-116
We conducted four kinds of psychophysical measurements on color vision to investigate whether the change in lens spectral transmittance that comes with aging is the primary factor in the change in color vision. We asked two observers (22 and 24 years old) to adapt to the scene while wearing goggles equipped with filters that simulate spectral transmittance at the retinal level of a person of 80 years old, when worn by 20 years old observer. During the test, which lasted as long as 12 hours, the observers performed (1) unique-white setting, (2) heterochromatic flicker photometry (HFP), (3) heterochromatic brightness matching (HBM), and (4) 100-hue test. The change in the results with and without the goggle showed that only difference in HFP sensitivity coincided exactly with the filter transmittance. A similar tendency was found in the difference between 20 and 80year-old observers in a previous study. The other tests matched with neither the difference in spectral transmittance nor the difference between 20-and 80year-old experimental results. Our results suggest that neural circuits, which may differ from those for illuminant change, play a significant role in correcting the relative spectrum change on the retina.
