December 2022
Volume 22, Issue 14
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   December 2022
The spatiotemporal transformation of color in the early visual cortex of humans: evidence from steady-state visual evoked potentials
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Songlin Qiao
    Shanghai University of Sport
  • Karl Gegenfurtner
    Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
  • Jing Chen
    Shanghai University of Sport
  • Footnotes
    Acknowledgements  National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 31900758]
Journal of Vision December 2022, Vol.22, 3777. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.3777
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      Songlin Qiao, Karl Gegenfurtner, Jing Chen; The spatiotemporal transformation of color in the early visual cortex of humans: evidence from steady-state visual evoked potentials. Journal of Vision 2022;22(14):3777. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.3777.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

The human chromatic contrast sensitivity measured with psychophysics has a lowpass shape. Human neurophysiology results, in contrast, have revealed extensively spatially-tuned bandpass population responses in the early visual cortex (e.g., Rabin, Switkes, Crognale, Schneck & Adams, 1994; Nunez, Shapley & Gordon, 2018). In monkey single-neuron studies, it has been demonstrated that there is a dynamic transformation from non-spatial tunning to spatially-tuned color responses in V1 (Johnson, Hawken & Shapley, 2001). However, such a transformation has never been identified in humans. Here, we investigated the spatial tuning of color in human observers (N = 16), by recording steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), which originate from early visual cortex especially the V1. We tested stimuli in red-green, blue-yellow and luminance (i.e., L-M, S, and Luminance axis in DKL space), at different spatial frequencies (0.2, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 8 cycles/deg), at both low and high temporal frequency (3 Hz and 15 Hz). The results reveal a dynamic change in spatial selectivity from high to low temporal frequency: color SSVEP is low-pass at 15Hz and band-pass at 3Hz. The low-pass and band-pass color SSVEP resembles neural responses of single-opponent and double-opponent V1 neurons, respectively, in macaque monkey (Johnson, Hawken & Shapley, 2001). In addition, in the band-pass responses at 3Hz, the preferred spatial frequency for S is lower than those for L-M and luminance, which is also consistent with monkey single neuron results. SSVEP to luminance is band-pass at both 15Hz and 3Hz, suggesting that the transformation is specific to color processing. The current result reveals a spatiotemporal interaction in human color vision. The visual cortex adds spatial selectivity for color boundaries in the processing of temporal filtering.

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