Age-related changes in color appearance depend on unique-hue components

In order to compare color appearance as seen by elderly and young people, we conducted an experiment where the subjects responded to the color appearance of 75 color chips using a categorical color naming method and an elemental color scaling method. The results show that categorical color naming between elderly and young subjects is almost identical for most color chips, but there were significant differences in the elemental color scaling between the two age groups depending on unique-hue components. The differences in yellow and blue components between elderly and young subjects suggest that the neural mechanism of color vision in elderly people may over perform on constancy of color appearance so as to compensate for the age-related change of the human crystalline lens. In addition, the chromatic components in elderly subjects indicate higher values than those in young subjects for low saturation color chips, whereas the chromatic components in elderly subjects indicate lower values than those in young subjects when viewing high saturation color chips. These results show that the age-related changes of unique hue components strongly depend on saturation of colors, and suggest that the practical range of color appearance in elderly people is small in comparison with young people.