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Hue discrimination, spectral sensitivity, and mathematical models of both are presented for a rhesus monkey which was exposed to intense green light. One of the monkey's eyes was blue-blinded in a previous experimental procedure and the other was color normal. The results of green light exposure showed a loss of sensitivity on both measures, with greater loss in the blue-blinded eye. Although there was considerable loss of hue-discrimination in the blue-green spectral regions, hue-discrimination at the point of best discrimination, 590 nm, remained unaffected. This pattern of results poses difficulties for models of hue discrimination, and has resulted in the proposed model employing three opponent color channels. The number of free-parameters are minimized and the integration between spectral sensitivity and hue discrimination enhanced by deriving parameters used in modeling hue discrimination from spectral sensitivity or vice versa.

We measured increment thresholds up to 5 degrees eccentricity using a 10' dia flash viewed against 10(4) td of 572-nm background. We found two distinct sensitivity profiles, one with flash wavelengths 410-470 nm and another with 520-580 nm. Spectral sensitivity plots indicate blue-sensitive cones and green-sensitive cones for the two profiles, respectively. Sensitivity of blue-sensitive cones is maximum at 1 degree eccentricity. Measurements at greater eccentricities are susceptible to adaptation to test field. The light-collecting area of blue-sensitive cones raised to a power follows the sensitivity profile of blue-sensitive cones.

Psychophysical measures of hue (wavelength) discrimination and spectral sensitivity were collected over a 3-year-period on a rhesus monkey whose right eye had been exposed to intense blue light 10 years prior and had shown a pronounced loss of blue sensitivity in an increment-threshold, spectral-sensitivity task. Hue discrimination, to a somewhat greater degree than spectral sensitivity, revealed large differences between the normal and blue-exposed eye. The difference limens were in some cases 100 nm for the blue-exposed eye compared to 10-15 nm for the normal eye. The hue-discrimination functions from the blue-exposed eye were similar in form to those from human tritanopes (blue-blind humans), and those from the monkey's normal eye were similar to those from normal humans. Detailed functions, where the variable wavelength was shorter as opposed to longer than the reference wavelength, were shown separately for each of the monkey's eyes; those from the blue-exposed eye were very similar to analogous functions from the one case where they have been shown separately for a human tritanope.