Dynamic red blindness as evidenced by event-related brain potentials

Abstract

To investigate the characteristics of dynamic color processing, we adopted two patterns of visual stimulus that were "onset-offset" which reflected static color stimulus and "sustained moving" without abrupt mode which reflected dynamic color stimulus to evoke event-related brain potentials (ERPs) of both normal and abnormal subjects. ERPs were recorded by neuroscan system and analyzed to uncover the follow results. In normal group, ERPs in response to dynamic red stimulus were characterized by frontal positive amplitudes with a latency of about 180 ms and the peak latency of the late positive potential (LPP) in a time window between 290 and 580 ms. In abnormal group and singularly individual of normal group, ERPs in response to dynamic red stimulus were fully lost and characterized by vanished amplitudes between 0 and 800 ms. ERPs of two groups in response to dynamic green and blue stimulus were the same as ERPs of the normal group in response to red stimulus. In comparison with, ERPs of the two groups in response to static red, green and blue stimulus were not different, which were only characterized by a peak latency of LPP in a time window between 350 and 650 ms. Our results firstly pointed to the view that a novel phenomena that the above some subjects could not completely apperceive a sort of dynamic red stimulus by ERPs was observed and called "dynamic red blindness". Furthermore, our results also suggested that low-frequency ERPs induced by "sustained moving" maybe a good and new method for testing dynamic color perception competence.