Abstract
Colors are represented in the cone-opponent signals, L-M versus S cones, at least up to the level of inputs to the primary visual cortex. We explored the hue selective responses in early cortical visual areas through recordings of steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), elicited by a flickering checkerboard whose color smoothly swept around the hue circle defined in a cone-opponent color space. If cone opponency dominates hue representation in the source of SSVEP signals, SSVEP amplitudes as a function of hue should form a profile that is line-symmetric along the cardinal axes of the cone-opponent color space. Observed SSVEP responses were clearly chromatic ones with increased SSVEP amplitudes and reduced response latencies for higher contrast conditions. The overall elliptic amplitude profile was significantly tilted away from the cardinal axes to have the highest amplitudes in the “lime-magenta” direction, indicating that the hue representation in question is not dominated by cone-opponency. The observed SSVEP amplitude hue profile was better described as a summation of a perceptual response and cone-opponent responses with a larger weight to the former. These results indicate that hue representations in the early visual cortex, measured by the SSVEP technique, are possibly related to perceptual color contrast.
Original language | English |
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Article number | tgaa059 |
Pages (from-to) | 1-14 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Cerebral Cortex Communications |
Volume | 1 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 1 Sept 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2020 |
Bibliographical note
FundingJapan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS KAKENHI grant number JP18K13365 to S.K., JP18H04995 to I.K.)
Notes
S.K. was also supported by the grant from Building of Consortia for the Development of Human Resources in Science and Technology program by Japan Science and Technology Agency. S.K.A. is very grateful to Satoshi Shioiri for inviting him to Tohoku University, which enabled this collaboration. Part of this study has appeared in the form of conference proceedings (Kaneko et al. 2018). Data and codes used in this study are available at https://osf.io/m47df/.
Keywords
- color representation
- EEG
- intermediate hues
- isoluminant colors
- primary visual cortex