FPL and sweep VEP to tritan stimuli in young human infants

Young infants can distinguish red from green without brightness cues which shows that neural pathways processing color information (the 'red-green' color-opponent pathway) are functional early in life. There is some doubt over whether the 'blue-yellow' pathway is functional in young infants. Here, we show that infants behave like tritanopic adults until 2-3 months post-term age. By 3-4 months, infants distinguish tritan stimuli, and therefore, the 'blue-yellow' pathway must be functional by that age. Our sweep visual evoked potentials to identical stimuli, however, are not significantly above noise levels, in disagreement with the behavioral responses. We discuss several possible explanations for the discrepancy. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.