Cortical representation of color information

Abstract

Color is one of the fundamental information in human vision. However, cortical representation of color information is not well understood. It is known that differences of cone responses represent color information at the lower levels of visual system and the higher order visual tasks, e.g., color memory, use categorical representation. We investigated the color representation in human visual cortex by measuring brain activities in adults and in infants. The fMRI study using differential phase encoding technique and adaptation experiments revealed that neural systems that selectively respond to intermediate colors are present at the level of primary visual cortex. The NIRS study in prelingual infants was conducted by investigating cortical response changes while presenting color pairs that span across a border of color category or that stays within a category. The result revealed that the categorical color representation is already. Implications from these studies will be discussed in the talk.