New normative data for the Farnsworth-Munsell 100-hue test

Color vision testing is an important part of the assessment of both retinal and optic nerve function. The Farnsworth-Munsell (FM) 100-hue test is widely accepted as a sensitive tool for detecting subtle deficits in hue discrimination. Originally designed in 1943 by Dean Farnsworth to measure color discrimination and to detect congenital dyschromatopsias, the test has also been used to assess a wide variety of acquired dyschromatopsias. The test requires the arrangement of 85 colored chips in consecutive color order. We have made two fundamental changes in the FM 100-hue which improve the test’s specificity and sensitivity for detecting color vision deficits. First, two chips were removed from the original test which results in a more even error score distribution for normals across the entire set of hues. Second, the addition of a white-to-black reliability test allows non-color-vision-related variables such as motivation and understanding to be assessed. In this paper, we present normative data for the revised 83-chip color vision test and the reliability test. We also outline our procedure for administering the FM 100-hue including a description of the illuminant C light source and our computerized barcode-based scoring system.