Young and old people see the world differently. On the one hand, older people have more life experience, but on the other, as newly published research suggests, older people may see the world a little less colorfully than younger people.
British researchers led by Janneke van Leeuwen of University College London conducted experiments with 17 healthy young people with an average age of 28 years and 20 healthy older people with an average age of 64 years.
The subjects were shown a variety of colors on a screen in a dark room for five seconds each. At the same time, the researchers measured the size of the test subjects’ eye openings.
It is a widely known phenomenon that the eye opening expands in dim light and contracts in brighter light. But that aside, the aperture is also known to become narrower when viewing brighter, harder colors, and wider when viewing softer, pastel shades.
The colors shown to participants in this experiment were purple, blue, green, yellow, and red in four brightness levels, as well as four shades of gray. A highly sensitive camera took one thousand images per second of the test participants’ eye opening.
The result is this: in elderly people, eye opening is less limited by bright colors than in young people. The difference between the age groups was particularly marked for the color green and purple. On the other hand, the eye openings of the young and old responded equally to the pure brightness.
Van Leeuwen and coauthors conclude in the journal Scientific Reports that the brain likely becomes duller in color brightness in older age.
The fact that elderly people perceive colors as less colorful than young people has been underlined by some previous scientific studies, but the present one is the first to support this observation also pupillometrically, i.e. with the support of the measurement of the diameter of the eye opening.
In general, it has long been assumed in the scientific community that color perception is something that tends to persist throughout life.
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2024-01-23 06:41:00
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