Colour vision tests and colour naming by thirteen incomplete achromats in Bishnupur.

Abstract

As an exploratory study six colour vision tests were given to nine male and two female achromats from the Shankhabanik community in Bishnupur, and to two additional similar males. All thirteen subjects had severe photophobia, fixation nystagmus, extreme weakness of vision (4/24 to 3/60) and the red end of the spectrum was much shortened. This research indicates that they had a form of incomplete achromatopsia, varying from an almost complete to a very severe partial loss of colour vision. The condition is inherited as an autosomal recessive. The most likely interpretation of these cases is that they are incomplete rod achromats. Their performance on the colour vision tests is tabulated, and shows complete inability to do the Ishihara test; nearly complete inability on the HRR test, with a possible slight tendency to do better in the yellow-blue than the red-green sub-tests; on Sloan's test they show approximate accordance with her results for achromats; they have severe difficulty with the dichotomous and 100-hue tests, with a possible slight tendency to make fewer errors on the G/B sections. The anomaloscope shows little abnormality of mid-matching points, but great increases in average matching ranges above the normal, although not absolute loss of colour sense, but with extreme darkening or shortening of the red end of the spectrum. Their colour naming was carefully recorded, and was fairly good occasionally, sometimes erroneous without being wildly at fault, and most often completely wrong. The records of colour naming were made, not, of course, as a form of colour vision test, but simply to illustrate the ways in which such defectives make an effort to use colour names in general use among their friends and relatives.