COLOR VISION

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does color vision mean? 

• COLOR VISION (noun)
  The noun COLOR VISION has 1 sense:

1. the normal ability to see colors

  Familiarity information: COLOR VISION used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• COLOR VISION (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The normal ability to see colors

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Synonyms:

chromatic vision; color vision; trichromacy

Hypernyms ("color vision" is a kind of...):

sight; vision; visual modality; visual sense (the ability to see; the visual faculty)

 Context examples 

Red-green color vision defects are the most common.

(Color Blindness, NIH)

Defects of color vision are mainly hereditary traits but can be secondary to acquired or developmental abnormalities in the CONES (RETINA).

(Defective Color Vision, NLM, Medical Subject Headings)

Rod cells haven’t been thought to play a role in color vision, but they do contain a pigment that’s sensitive to green light.

(New color vision pathway unveiled, NIH)

Moreover, the face-color memory effects uncovered in the study appear to be encoded by the L and M cones, the photoreceptors that make trichromatic color vision possible.

(Rosy health and sickly green: color associations play robust role in reading faces, National Institutes of Health)

Cones are less sensitive to light than rods, but they provide vision with higher spatial and temporal acuity, and the combination of signals from cones with different pigments allows color vision.

(Cone, NLM, Medical Subject Headings)

It may be complete, in which the individual can only perceive black, white, or shades or gray, or incomplete, in which the individual has a residual amount of color vision.

(Achromatopsia, NCI Thesaurus)

The other major types are blue-yellow color vision defects and a complete absence of color vision.

(Color Blindness, NIH)

Severity of hereditary defects of color vision depends on the degree of mutation of the OPSIN genes (on X CHROMOSOME and CHROMOSOME 3, HUMAN) that code the photopigments for red, green and blue.

(Defective Color Vision, NLM, Medical Subject Headings)

The findings also suggest that social communication cues from faces factored into evolutionary selective pressures that gave rise to trichromatic color vision in our ancestors 23 million years ago.

(Rosy health and sickly green: color associations play robust role in reading faces, National Institutes of Health)

There are three main kinds of color vision defects.

(Color Blindness, NIH)