Human visual gamma for color stimuli
Abstract
Strong gamma-band oscillations in primate early visual cortex can be induced by homogeneous color surfaces (Peter et al., 2019; Shirhatti and Ray, 2018). Compared to other hues, particularly strong gamma oscillations have been reported for red stimuli. However, precortical color processing and the resultant strength of input to V1 has often not been fully controlled for. Therefore, stronger responses to red might be due to differences in V1 input strength. We presented stimuli that had equal luminance and cone contrast levels in a color coordinate system based on responses of the lateral geniculate nucleus, the main input source for area V1. With these stimuli, we recorded magnetoencephalography in 30 human participants. We found gamma oscillations in early visual cortex which, contrary to previous reports, did not differ between red and green stimuli of equal L-M cone contrast. Notably, blue stimuli with contrast exclusively on the S‑cone axis induced very weak gamma responses, as well as smaller event-related fields and poorer change-detection performance. The strength of human color gamma responses for stimuli on the L-M axis could be well explained by L-M cone contrast and did not show a clear red bias when L-M cone contrast was properly equalized.
Data availability
Custom preprocessing code, per-trial data and code for statistical analyses are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5578940.
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Dataset for Human visual gamma for color hues equated for LGN driveZenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.5578940.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (FOR 1847 FR2557/2-1)
- Pascal Fries
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (FR2557/5-1-CORNET)
- Pascal Fries
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (FR2557/7-1 DualStreams)
- Pascal Fries
European Union (FP7-604102-HBP)
- Pascal Fries
International Max Planck Research School for Neural Circuits (open access funding)
- Benjamin J Stauch
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Subjects gave written informed consent. The study was approved by the ethics committee of the medical faculty of the Goethe University Frankfurt (Resolution E 36/18).
Copyright
© 2022, Stauch et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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