Blue-green colour vision acuity

I am, for some reason, fairly bad at telling blue and green apart. I can tell that the Straight Dope colours are red, yellow and blue, and I think these smileys are :eek: blue, :rolleyes: green , :stuck_out_tongue: green, :D, grr… blue and :frowning: blue. But I wouldn’t be surprised to be told that the smileys are “actually” not like that, and I scored an 88 (0 being best) on this test, with blue green being the worst.

Is this common? Is it something to do with my cones, or my brain? And are there other colour acuity tests out there?

My dad is colorblind and has bought several purple “blue” shirts and hats.

There is a type of colorblindness called Blue-Yellow colorblindness, which affects the ability to distinguish green from blue.
http://www.colblindor.com/2006/05/08/tritanopia-blue-yellow-color-blindness/

There’s a little test for it here:

(choose the choice that looks most similar to the bigger sample)

For the record, the “big grin” is green.

I’d call :smiley: more of a teal myself.

I remember stumbling upon this Wikipedia article on the distinction between blue and green in language - apparently not all languages distinguish between the two. Makes you wonder if there are actual differences in people’s perception, or is it more a matter of how they are expressing what they perceive. Would you describe Teal as being closer to green or blue?

I got a 4, and all 4 of my mistakes were in the blue-green area.

If Wikipedia is accurate it looks like the human eye has a real low point in sensitivity around 480nm - 500nm or so between the small and medium cones, which corresponds with blue-green.

No wonder many cultures don’t distinguish between the two and that’s a trouble point on the test.

FWIW I’d say teal is more green then blue.

The purple=blue thing is what I have. I’m pretty sure I have a decreased sensitivity to red making me “red/green colorblind”. What you have is less common.

No way I even going to attempt that test. If I did I would end up with one major headache

It’s your cones.

Lots (and most much easier and quicker to do than the one you linked to). Google “color blindness test”. (Although many of the online tests are just for the more common Red-Green form of colorblindness.)

I got a 3, and likewise, all of my mistakes were also in the blue-green area. I’m male, by the way.

I took the test, and I now understand some of the looks I’ve gotten in the past.

Also, sometimes I could only see one set of colored blobs. I assume this isn’t good.

Most forms of color blindness (except for the very rare cases of people with no functional cones at all) do not cause any very significant problems. Heck, nobody even realized that colorblindness existed until 1794, when Dalton realized he had it. Most colorblind people are unaware of it, and it really doesn’t matter.

I assume it must have mattered to some of our primate ancestors.