Color Perception and Its Coding in Simian Neocortex

Abstract

Perception of color by human and nonhuman primates is a complex problem, which is studied not only by neurophysiology, but also by neighboring fields of science such as psychophysiology, psycholinguistics, and even philosophy. With neurophysiology as a starting point, I review contributions of adjacent fields in understanding of the primates’ color space encoding. All known at the moment neurophysiologic mechanisms of color perception by primates are reviewed and a hypothetical way of color stimuli processing is proposed, suggesting at a final stage involvement of conceptual (gnostic) neurons encoding only colors of visual stimuli.