Abstract
THE chief characteristic which distinguishes colourblind people from those with normal vision, is a reduced ability to distinguish colours that are normally quite distinct. Superficially, therefore, it would seem highly improbable that colour-blind persons could detect a camouflaged building that an ordinary observer would miss. This suggestion, however, which has come from the United States recently, is not wholly without foundation, as there are at least three ways in which certain colour-blind observers might see more than the ordinary person. For example, in a building camouflaged with large irregular patches of colour, the actual outline of the building may be lost in the jumble of these patterns. But the colour-blind person may be scarcely conscious of the variegated colours, so that to him the outline of the building may be almost unaffected by the camouflage. In the Ishihara test for colourblindness, certain of the cards actually use this principle; a faint blue figure is printed on a background of highly coloured dots of various hues. To the normal observer the blue figure is lost against the background, but the colour-blind person may spot it. Again, in the protanopic and protanomalous type of defect, reds and yellows appear darker than usual, and with certain colouring of building and background this could lead to an enhanced contrast and so give the colour-blind person his advantage.
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Colour-Blindness and Camouflage. Nature 146, 226 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/146226a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/146226a0