Continuous motion tracking for accurate and efficient color vision assessment

The assessment of color vision is crucial in both fundamental visual research and clinical diagnosis. However, existing tools for color vision assessment are limited by various factors. This study introduces a novel, efficient method for color vision assessment, which is based on a continuous motion tracking task and a Kalman filter model. The effectiveness of this new method was evaluated by assessing the color vision of both color-deficient observers and normal controls. The results from both a small sample (N = 29, Experiment 1) and a large sample (N = 171, Experiment 2) showed that color-deficient observers could be perfectly identified within 20 s using the tracking performance. We also compared the new method with a traditional psychophysical detection task to examine the consistency of perceptual noise estimation between the two methods, and the results showed a moderate correlation (Pearson's r =.59 ~.64). The results also demonstrated that the new method could measure individuals’ contrast response functions of both red–green and blue–yellow colors (e.g., the L–M and S–(L + M) axes in DKL color space) in just a few minutes, showing much higher efficiency than traditional methods. All the findings from this study indicate that the continuous motion tracking method is a promising tool for both rapid screening of color vision deficiencies and fundamental research on color vision.