I’ve always kind of idly wondered about this. I always get every one of these things right–but many of htem, I have to sit there and puzzle it out a bit to some extent. I can see the number shapes, but sometimes, have to really look hard to be sure what I’m seeing.
I am asking if this fits with everyone else’s experience.
(There’s a widget to take the test near the top, or you can just scroll down to see each example outside the widget.)
For me the one that says five is maybe the hardest to discern. And the one that says 74 really almost looks like a 71 to me. The bar across the four is really hard to make out. I mean, I can see the bar, but it sort of almost doesn’t compute unless I’m being careful. Hard to explain. But is this how it is for everyone?
Some are more difficult by design. If you look below how some may appear different depending on what color deficiency you have. Some subtypes are functionally similar, but not identical.
So that does not mean that there is anything “wrong” with you. But diagnosis uses many more tests than just Ishihara plates.
No colorblindness here. The circles are slightly more difficult than reading black-on-white text, but not by much. Most of the difficulty is due to the indistinct boundaries and composition as a dot field, not due to the color difference or lack thereof.
The bar on the “4” in the 74 circle pattern is a different color than the rest of the number; its a lighter shade of green. Perhaps that’s why it’s harder to make out for you.
No discerning or needing to pay attention. I took the “test” just to click on stuff, and was mostly drumming my fingers waiting for the 3 seconds to pass before I could type the number and go to the next.
You could have trouble with the test due to astigmatism or far-sightedness, or in the case of my husband, very, very bad myopia. All of that has to be taken into account. Some people’s vision changes a lot between exams, so that even if they take the test with their glasses on, they could still make mistakes.
I have mild myopia without astigmatism, so I have no problem with the test. My husband couldn’t possibly take it without his glasses on, and with out-dated prescription, might struggle a little.
It’s just a screening test, though. If you fail, you get a more involved test, and probably a number of people who fail the screening, pass the more involved test. But the screening gives enough information about the people who pass it that it’s a waste of time giving the more involved test to everyone.
The 2 was the hard one for me. I can see the different colors easily enough but it seems to me like there’s three color groups - green and gray; orange and yellow; and a red and pink background. The orange and yellow circles seemed to stand out just as much as the green and gray ones did and it took me a second to figure out which circles were forming a pattern.
My answer without looking at them was ‘not hard’. But then I clicked on the link and kinda struggled with a few of them, I just assumed it was either my monitor or the difference between seeing them in print vs seeing them on a monitor. But I notice a lot of the responses here are people having the same issues I had.
I don’t know if these patterns are the exact same patters/colors used all the time and it’s just that it’s harder to see on a monitor or the person that made them made them a bit more difficult because some of them (the same ones others mentioned above) seemed a lot harder than what I remember having to do in grade school and seeing in text books over the years.
Rereading the descriptions to see what it says a colorblind person might see, I wasn’t seeing that, it’s just that where there was a 29 (for example) it took me a few seconds to decide if it was a 28 or a 29, I never wondered if it was a 70.
With the 57, I wondered if it might be 51, not 35.
I think it’s time to update the fonts on those plates (and maybe stop calling them plates). I’m thinking most kids now aren’t familiar with those fonts. Even when I first took those tests, almost 30 years ago, those fonts looked ‘old’. I wonder if any kids fail the tests because it’s like giving them a sight test with all the letters in calligraphy or cursive.
They have lots of photoreceptor pigments. That does not necessarily translate to good color vision, at least not in a manner we would consider “better.” See: Thoen et al. (2014) Science.
The one with the 9 was slightly hard, in that I had to look at it and then figure out what shape it was. I could still tell it was a completely different color, though. The rest I just saw immediately.
Do you, OP, have any problems distinguishing faces? I remember this being linked with a bit of pattern recognition problems, which could make these harder without having anything to do with color blindness.
And, yes, the monitor can be an issue–if the color isn’t set properly. But I would expect it to make color identification easier, not harder.
