Multivoxel fMRI analysis of color tuning in human primary visual cortex

• Published in: Journal of vision (Charlottesville, Va.) Vol. 9; no. 1; pp. 1.1 - 1
• Main Authors: Parkes, Laura M, Marsman, Jan-Bernard C, Oxley, David C, Goulermas, John Y, Wuerger, Sophie M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 08.01.2009
• Subjects: Adult; Brain Mapping - methods; Color; Color Vision - physiology; Female; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Male; Neurons - physiology; Oxygen - blood; Photic Stimulation - methods; Retinal Cone Photoreceptor Cells - physiology; Subtraction Technique; Visual Cortex - blood supply; Visual Cortex - cytology; Visual Cortex - physiology; Young Adult
• ISSN: 1534-7362; 1534-7362
• DOI: 10.1167/9.1.1

We use multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to study the spatial clustering of color-selective neurons in the human brain. Our main objective was to investigate whether MVPA reveals the spatial arrangements of color-selective neurons in human primary visual cortex (V1). We measured the distributed fMRI activation patterns for different color stimuli (Experiment 1: cardinal colors (to which the LGN is known to be tuned), Experiment 2: perceptual hues) in V1. Our two main findings were that (i) cone-opponent cardinal color modulations produce highly reproducible patterns of activity in V1, but these were not unique to each color. This suggests that V1 neurons with tuning characteristics similar to those found in LGN are not spatially clustered. (ii) Unique activation patterns for perceptual hues in V1 support current evidence for a spatially clustered hue map. We believe that our work is the first to show evidence of spatial clustering of neurons with similar color preferences in human V1.