Difficulties faced by color-anomalous observers in interpreting color displays
Carl Richard Cavonius, Marina Mueller, John Dixon Mollon · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1990
We have reconstructed the color spaces of normal observers and of protanomalous and deuteranomalous observers by measuring the time that each requires to decide whether pairs of colors are the same or different. By means of a multidimensional scaling procedure these response times were ordered into a space such that colors that were more quickly discriminated were farther from one another. When presented with a set of colors that yields an approximately rectangular color space for normal observers, anomalous observers have difficulty in discriminating colors that lie on lines parallel to the red-green cardinal axis. Their color spaces suggest that the gamut of color that anomalous observers experience is far more impoverished than is usually thought to be the case, and that their ability to interpret color-coded displays is correspondingly limited.