Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 38, Issue 15, Pages 3657-3668Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2307-17.2018
Keywords
color vision; drift diffusion; fMRI; object imagery; pattern classification; reaction times
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Funding
- German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) [FKZ 01GQ1002]
- German Excellence Initiative of the German Research Foundation (DFG) [EXC307]
- Max Planck Society, Germany
- German Research Foundation (DFG) [SFB 1233]
- Robust Vision: Inference Principles and Neural Mechanisms [TP 09]
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Color is special among basic visual features in that it can form a defining part of objects that are engrained in our memory. Whereas most neuroimaging research on human color vision has focused on responses related to external stimulation, the present study investigated howsensory-driven color vision is linked to subjective color perception induced by object imagery. We recorded fMRI activity in male and female volunteers during viewing of abstract color stimuli that were red, green, or yellow in half of the runs. In the other half we asked them to produce mental images of colored, meaningful objects (such as tomato, grapes, banana) corresponding to the same three color categories. Although physically presented color could be decoded from all retinotopically mapped visual areas, only hV4 allowed predicting colors of imagined objects when classifiers were trained on responses to physical colors. Importantly, only neural signal in hV4 was predictive of behavioral performance in the color judgment task on a trial-by-trial basis. The commonality between neural representations of sensory-driven and imagined object color and the behavioral link to neural representations in hV4 identifies area hV4 as a perceptual hub linking externally triggered color vision with color in self-generated object imagery.
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