Color Vision for Human Factors Engineering: When Color Helps, When It Hurts, and for Whom
Abstract
Color vision serves everyday tasks, from judging food and reading skin to segmenting scenes and reading signs, displays, and data. Designers use color in safety codes, interfaces, visualizations, lighting, and interiors, but practice often outruns evidence. I review when color helps, when it hurts, and for whom. Color helps when it carries information that luminance and form do not, as in judging ripeness, guiding search, and supporting scene memory. It hurts at isoluminance, in fine detail, in clutter or conflict, in non-uniform colormaps, and when it is the only carrier of critical information. Engineers have exploited these limits, as in chroma subsampling, and ignored them at a cost, as in color-only safety codes. Who benefits varies widely: color vision deficiency is common, anomalous trichromacy spans a continuum of severity, discrimination declines with age, and appearance and naming vary among color-normal observers. Component color codes, intelligence-test materials, and aviation color-vision standards illustrate these lessons. I contrast robust effects of illumination on alertness with weak or failed claims about surface color, mood, and performance, propose design principles for human factors engineering, and grade the evidence behind common claims.
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BibTeX
@misc{peterzell2026color,
title = {{Color Vision for Human Factors Engineering: When Color Helps, When It Hurts, and for Whom}},
author = {David Henry Peterzell},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/yd79k_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/yd79k_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Color Vision for Human Factors Engineering: When Color Helps, When It Hurts, and for Whom
AU - David Henry Peterzell
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/yd79k_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/yd79k_v1/
AB - Color vision serves everyday tasks, from judging food and reading skin to segmenting scenes and reading signs, displays, and data. Designers use color in safety codes, interfaces, visualizations, lighting, and interiors, but practice often outruns evidence. I review when color helps, when it hurts, and for whom. Color helps when it carries information that luminance and form do not, as in judging ripeness, guiding search, and supporting scene memory. It hurts at isoluminance, in fine detail, in clutter or conflict, in non-uniform colormaps, and when it is the only carrier of critical information. Engineers have exploited these limits, as in chroma subsampling, and ignored them at a cost, as in color-only safety codes. Who benefits varies widely: color vision deficiency is common, anomalous trichromacy spans a continuum of severity, discrimination declines with age, and appearance and naming vary among color-normal observers. Component color codes, intelligence-test materials, and aviation color-vision standards illustrate these lessons. I contrast robust effects of illumination on alertness with weak or failed claims about surface color, mood, and performance, propose design principles for human factors engineering, and grade the evidence behind common claims.
ER -