bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/596957; this version posted April 4, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Visual and non-visual properties of filters manipulating short- 2 wavelength light 3 Manuel Spitschan1, 2, 3 ¶, [0000-0002-8572-9268], Rafael Lazar2, 3, [0000-0001-7972-5634], & Christian Cajochen2, 3, [0000- 4 0003-2699-7171] 5 6 1 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom 7 2 Centre for Chronobiology, Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel, Switzerland 8 3 Transfaculty Research Platform Molecular and Cognitive Neurosciences, University of Basel, Switzerland 9 10 ¶ To whom correspondence should be addressed: Dr Manuel Spitschan,
[email protected] 11 12 13 Abstract 14 Optical filters and tints manipulating short-wavelength light (so-called “blue-blocking” or 15 “blue-attenuating”) are used as a remedy for a range of ocular, retinal, neurological and 16 psychiatric disorders. In many cases, the only available quantification of the optical effects of 17 a given optical filter is the spectral transmittance, which specifies the amount of light 18 transmitted as a function of wavelength. Here, we propose a novel physiologically relevant 19 and retinally referenced framework for quantifying the visual and non-visual effects of these 20 filters, incorporating the attenuation of luminance (luminance factor), the attenuation of 21 melanopsin activation (melanopsin factor), the shift in colour, and the reduction of the colour 22 gamut (gamut factor).