The study reveals the neural mechanisms of cognitive color space formation.

On August 26, neurons published a research paper online entitled "The hierarchical color processing mechanisms of macaques V1, V2 and V4", which was carried out by the Center for Brain Science and Intelligent Technology Innovation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Institute of Neuroscience), the Shanghai Brain Science and Brain Research Center, the Wang Wei Research Group of the National Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, and Tang Shiming Laboratory, a professor at Peking University's School of Life Sciences.
the study used endogenic signal optical imaging, dual photon imaging and electrophysiological records to detail the tonal structure of different visual brain regions of hierarchy, revealing the neural mechanisms of cognitive color space formation.
people's subjective aesthetic feelings of colorful colors are different, and color is more indicative than any other perception that perception is the product of neural activity in the brain.
, a British scientist, realized as early as the 18th century that light waves are electromagnetic waves that do not have color.
people can recognize thousands of different shades, which is the brain's label for visible light information in different bands.
there are three types of cone cells on the retina that detect visible light in short, medium, and long bands, so the color space we perceive is also three-dimensional.
one dimension is brightness, reflecting the "plus and" capability of the cone signal processing, and the hue and saturation are the other two dimensions, generated by the activation differences between the different cone signals.
The color cognitive space of human beings is measured by psychological cognitive experiments, in which the tonal dimensions of color space are described as "tone discs", and according to the theory of red, green and blue, the distance between the three hues of red, green and blue is equal.
other cognitive color spaces, such as CIELab color spaces, are defined based on the theory of red, green, yellow, and blue.
Color-coded neurons have been found in the abdominal pathways of primate vision brains, from the primary visual cortical layer (V1), the pathway cortical cortical layer (V2 and V4), to the temporal cortical cortical layer (IT).
but how color is processed in different visual brain regions of hierarchy, especially how to form color cognitive space at the psychological subjective level, is not clear.
To explore this complex brain science problem, the researchers used endologic signal optical imaging, dual photon imaging, and electrophysiological records to model non-human primate macaques as animals and compared the neural activity of three continuous visual brain regions, from primary (V1) to middle and advanced (V2 and V4), that respond to red, orange, yellow, green, green, blue, and purple color stimulation with exactly the same brightness.
study found that in all three continuous visual brain regions, there are many color reaction speckle regions of different sizes and discrete distributions, and neurons encoding different light wave bands gather in these speckle regions, forming a "tonal map" composed of adjacent tonal stitching.
these "tonal maps" are like rainbows of varying sizes scattered across the surface of the visual brain.
In the recorded activity of V1 neurons, the dominant red and blue stimulation reactions were located at both ends of the visible light band, but this "end-spectrum" neuron reaction advantage gradually disappeared in the V2 brain region and was virtually non-existent in V4.
from a neurocalculation perspective, the brain appears to be gradually integrating input from the retina's mutually antagonist cone nerve signals to create a space for human cognitive color.
Any given light tone information from the retina first exists in V1, but this information in the V2 and V4 brain regions after further information integration and coding processing of neurons, the initial formation of various subjective tone cognition of human beings.
Combined with the functions of other, more advanced brain regions, the visual brain as a whole produces neuronal reactions sensitive to a variety of discrete tones and brightness, and forms a complex neural computing network that encodes the changing light of the outside world, creating colorful color labels in the brain.
The innovative findings of this study are not only a detailed description and study of these tonal structures, but also the first quantitative detection of the three different levels of visual cortical tonal map (palette) and people's subjective perception of the degree of color spatial location of the match, which increased significantly with the improvement of the visual cortical level.
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