The brains of healthy older people are less sensitive to the intensity of colors in the world around them. Explanations.
- In the study, the pupils of healthy seniors constricted less in response to color saturation than those of young adults.
- This phenomenon was particularly observed when participants saw green and magenta hues.
- As we age, the body’s sensitivity to color saturation levels decreases in the primary visual cortex, the part of the brain that receives, integrates, and processes visual information transmitted through the retina.
Pupil responses to colors are reduced in seniors. This was recently revealed by researchers at University College London (England). In order to reach this conclusion, they conducted a study published in the journal Scientific Reports. In the research, the team compared how the pupils of young and old people responded to different aspects of color in the environment.
With age, pupils constricted less in response to color saturation
For the purposes of the work, the scientists recruited 17 healthy young adults, with an average age of 27.7 years, and 20 healthy elderly people, with an average age of 64.4 years. Participants were placed in a dark room and saw 26 different colors for five seconds each. Colors featured included dark, muted, saturated, and light shades of magenta, blue, green, yellow, and red, as well as two shades of orange and four grayscale colors. During this time, the authors measured the diameter of their pupils using a highly sensitive eye-tracking camera. As a reminder, pupils contract in response to increased brightness and color saturation.
According to the results, the pupils of healthy older adults constricted less in response to color saturation than those of young adults. A phenomenon particularly marked for green and magenta shades. However, younger and older volunteers responded similarly to the “lightness” of a color shade. The team believes that with age, the body’s sensitivity to color saturation levels decreases in the primary visual cortex, the part of the brain that receives, integrates and processes visual information transmitted by the retina.
Dementia: Patients ‘may show changes in color preferences’
“This work challenges scientists’ long-held belief that color perception remains relatively constant throughout life, and instead suggests that colors slowly fade with age. Our findings could also contribute to explain why our color preferences may change as we age and why some older people prefer to dress in bright colors,” said Janneke van Leeuwen, lead author of the study, in a statement.
“Our findings could have broad implications for how we adapt fashion, decor and other color ‘spaces’ to older adults, and perhaps even for our understanding of diseases of the aging brain, such as dementia People with dementia may exhibit changes in their color preferences and other symptoms related to the visual brain – to interpret these correctly, we must first assess the effects of healthy aging on color perception. “Further research is therefore needed to delineate the functional neuroanatomy of our findings, as higher cortical areas could also be involved.” concluded Jason Warren, co-author of the work.
