# Individual Differences in Color Vision Assessed with Chromatic Textures

> **NIH VA I21** · VA LOMA LINDA HEALTHCARE SYSTEM · 2024 · —

## Abstract

Veterans with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) often report visual problems despite normal or near-normal
performance on clinical tests of afferent vision. Strikingly, a similar pattern is observed in the auditory domain,
which suggests two potentially overlapping explanations for the (multi-)sensory deficits in mTBI: (a) damage to
the ascending sensory pathways produces subtle deficits that may not be detectable on standard clinical tests;
and (b) changes at more central levels of sensory processing or in cognitive, affective, or associative brain
networks lead to deficits in processing complex sensory environments. Therefore, an ideal measure of sensory
capacity in mTBI should account for changes at these different levels of processing. Returning to the domain of
vision, recent research suggests that color vision is highly sensitive to acquired disorders or trauma affecting the
early visual pathway. At the same time, color plays a significant role in higher visual functions such as object
segregation and visual attention. These properties make color vision an ideal candidate for assessment of visual
function in mTBI. However, current tests of color vision focus on detection of (primarily congenital) losses
originating at the retinal color receptors. The proposed study begins to develop a new test of color vision
designed to capture changes at low (e.g., retinal) and high (e.g., cortical) levels of visual processing. The test
relies on discrimination of chromatic textures whose individual elements are assigned an equiluminant shade
along a continuum from pure green to pure red. The distribution of colors follows a statistical pattern such that
discrimination among two textures with opposing patterns relies on the visual system’s ability to extract those
patterns. Different types of patterns are used to probe different aspects of color processing. Pattern extraction is
assumed to rely on a limited number of mechanisms sensitive to different shades of red and/or green and a
‘mixing module’ that allows the mechanisms to be combined in different ways to encode different patterns. A
mathematical model of texture discrimination performance is used to enumerate, for a group of observers: (a)
the number and structure of the low-level mechanisms; (b) each observer’s sensitivity to those mechanisms; and
(c) each observer’s unique mixing proportions. Performance across different chromatic texture patterns is taken
to reflect a given observer’s unique profile of red-green vision. This proposal aims to validate this paradigm in
groups of younger (25-34 yrs.) and older (55-64 yrs.) Veterans with normal color vision, given that low-level color
sensitivity is known to decrease by ~10% per decade of life with considerable individual differences in high-level
color processing within and between age groups. The first specific aim is to determine whether chromatic
texture discrimination captures aspects of color processing beyond those captured by well-establishe...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 11056675
- **Project number:** 5I21RX003594-03
- **Recipient organization:** VA LOMA LINDA HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
- **Principal Investigator:** Jonathan Henry Venezia
- **Activity code:** I21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** VA
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** —
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-10-01 → 2025-09-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/11056675

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 11056675, Individual Differences in Color Vision Assessed with Chromatic Textures (5I21RX003594-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/11056675. Licensed CC0.

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