Identification of a novel dynamic red blindness in human by event-related brain potentials

Dynamic color is an important carrier that takes information in some special occupations. However, up to the present, there are no available and objective tests to evaluate dynamic color processing. To investigate the characteristics of dynamic color processing, we adopted two patterns of visual stimulus called “onset-offset” which reflected static color stimuli and “sustained moving” without abrupt mode which reflected dynamic color stimuli to evoke event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in primary color amblyopia patients (abnormal group) and subjects with normal color recognition ability (normal group). ERPs were recorded by Neuroscan system. The results showed that in the normal group, ERPs in response to the dynamic red stimulus showed frontal positive amplitudes with a latency of about 180 ms, a negative peak at about 240 ms and a peak latency of the late positive potential (LPP) in a time window between 290 and 580 ms. In the abnormal group, ERPs in response to the dynamic red stimulus were fully lost and characterized by vanished amplitudes between 0 and 800 ms. No significant difference was noted in ERPs in response to the dynamic green and blue stimulus between the two groups (P>0.05). ERPs of the two groups in response to the static red, green and blue stimulus were not much different, showing a transient negative peak at about 170 ms and a peak latency of LPP in a time window between 350 and 650 ms. Our results first revealed that some subjects who were not identified as color blindness under static color recognition could not completely apperceive a sort of dynamic red stimulus by ERPs, which was called “dynamic red blindness”. Furthermore, these results also indicated that low-frequency ERPs induced by “sustained moving” may be a good and new method to test dynamic color perception competence.