Schedule of Events | Symposia

A practical multi-measure approach assessing compromised color perception

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Javid Sadr¹ (sadr@uleth.ca); ¹University of Lethbridge

Visual object perception is a crucial, complex, and ubiquitous component of moment-to-moment behavior in daily life. For certain classes of objects, however, fast and robust visual search, discrimination, etc may succeed using just one or a few easily quantified dimensions (e.g., individual invariant, non-accidental, even pre-attentive features), such as a diagnostic color. Color perception in particular, however, relies on cortical processing of color constancy: the broader analyses of the light source, surface reflectances, and context, which allow us to handle varying lighting conditions and maintain accurate color percepts. Nevertheless, certain natural and artificial circumstances can disrupt color constancy and disable color perception, and here, in a common and potentially dangerous real-world application, we find that the filtering of light by colored translucent containers -- common prescription bottles dispensed by pharmacies -- results in gross misperception of colored items within, i.e., prescription pills. Using simple, physical, real-world tasks and testing materials, we find that normal color vision is thoroughly disrupted when colored pills are viewed in this common form of containment -- and that this persists across multiple behavioral measures and scenarios, whether attempting to name, match, or simply discriminate colors. Critically, these complementary tasks and testing approaches also serve to confirm that the extreme color perception errors observed are not due to linguistic, memory, or other capacity limits but are fundamentally perceptual in nature. Equally, in a practical real-world sense, this generates great concern regarding the very real and common danger of medical mishaps in prescription pill handling by patients.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Vision