Cortical area V4 and its role in the perception of color

Abstract

The color and lightness vision of three monkeys with bilateral removal of cortical area V4 and three unoperated controls were tested by measuring their ability to discriminate between two rows of colored or gray stimuli. In one row, the stimuli were ordered in terms of either chromaticity or luminance, whereas in the other row they were disordered. Their ability to select the odd-one-out in an array of colors or grays and to select the colored patch from an array of achromatic grays was also assessed. Unlike an achromatopsic patient tested previously in an identical fashion, monkeys with V4 lesions performed indistinguishably from controls in the oddity test. The animals lacking V4 were slightly impaired at discriminating between ordered and disordered arrays of colors or grays, but the color impairment was no more severe than the impairment with grays. These deficits were readily accounted for in terms of the conspicuous deficits in pattern discrimination apparent in a nine-choice pattern oddity task. The results do not support the view that cortical area V4 in the monkey is the homolog of the cortical 'color center' in humans, located in the lingual and fusiform gyri and damage to which leads to the clinical syndrome of cerebral achromatopsia, unless it is the additional damage to underlying white matter that leads to the severe color disorder in patients.