Research by RIT assistant professor Benjamin Chin published in Science Advances may help determine which wavelengths helps the eye focus best.
ROCHESTER, N.Y., April 15, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The human eye is a biological camera, and its lens, like all lenses, can only focus on one wavelength at a time. Scientists have yet to determine which wavelength this is.
RIT Assistant Professor Benjamin Chin is shining new light on this question through his research in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science. His findings, recently published in Science Advances, show that the wavelength and focus of the eye may depend on what the human is looking at. This knowledge can help inform interventions for slowing the development and progression of myopia, or nearsightedness.
Chin studies ocular accommodation, which examines how the eye brings objects at different distances into the best focus. Eyes are constantly refocusing, but scientists don't fully understand what the eyeball is actually doing and how the eye and brain are communicating to make the process possible.
As Chin explained, lenses have chromatic aberration, which refers to when not all wavelengths of light are focused at the same point (think of how light splits into different colors when it passes through a prism). He and his co-researchers looked at the effect of color or spectrum of light entering the eye.
"We measured people's accommodation in response to different light spectra entering the eye," he said. "We would show people things on a screen, change the color of light coming out of the screen, and then measure how the lens in people's eyes changed in real time."
Researchers then built a model of the visual system to try to understand what neural signals could be guiding the accommodation behaviors they saw. Results showed that what spectra the eye focuses on tends be the one that is most prominent in the environment being viewed, with one caveat: the visual system may avoid focusing on blue, or shortwave, light.
The findings help inform the idea that chromatic aberration may be implicated in the growth of the eyeball. Myopia, or nearsightedness, is caused by excessive growth of the eyeball. In recent years, a large body of research has explored the idea that the correct light spectrum entering the eye could be able to slow down the growth of the eyeball, and therefore, slow down nearsightedness. However, it is unclear what this spectrum might be. Most research in the area has emphasized measuring light in the environment, rather than how light is actually focused by the eye.
"In order to understand factors causing the growth of the eyeball," said Chin, "you also need to understand how the visual system in real time deals with basic, blurry images of light entering the eye. That is the big picture."
Chin began his research at the University of California, Berkeley, before beginning at RIT in fall 2025. Co-authors of the paper are Martin Banks, Austin Roorda, and Emily Cooper from University of California, Berkeley; and Derek Nankivil from Johnson & Johnson Vision Care. Support for the research came from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes for Health.
Media Contact
Mollie Radzinski, Rochester Institute of Technology, 585-520-1487, [email protected], www.rit.edu
SOURCE Rochester Institute of Technology
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