Here's the real reason why older people perceive colors differently

Color pupillometry testing, in which 17 healthy young adults aged 27 years and 20 healthy older adults aged 64 years were examined, was performed in a dark room where 26 digital color areas were displayed on a black background.

Each trial began with the presentation of a gray screen on a black background for five seconds, followed by a color.

The test assessed participants' ability to perceive changes in brightness and saturation of experimental color stimuli within each color category (purple, blue, green, yellow, red, and grayscale), as well as the saturation of colors or similar brightnesses of different colors.

All participants scored 100% on the Color Matching Scale, a novel 12-item color perception task designed as a stringent low-level visual perception control task to assess basic color perception.

“Older adults have been found to exhibit sensitivity to the blue and yellow axis but weaker pupillary responses to chroma increases predominantly in the green and magenta axis.

The findings provide physiological evidence that color perception fades with age, with important implications for color-based practices and interventions in the context of healthy aging and neurodegenerative disorders in old age.

In summary, "Colors are not fixed or uniform sensations because of the complex interactions between natural variation in retinal cone photoreceptors, environmental factors, neuronal processing dynamics, and psychosocial influences. This complexity makes it very difficult to study the relationships between the physical properties of colors and how people perceive them."