V4

From Psy3241

• Visual area

• Involved in form recognition

• Supports the 2 streams hypothesis

• Located in the extrastriate visual cortex of the macaque monkey

• Currently unknown if homologous area exists in humans because research has been mainly confined to monkeys.

• Long-term plasticity, encodes stimulus salience, is gated by signals coming from frontal eye fields.

• Selective attention can change firing rates by about 20%

• Recent research (2006) by Conway and Tsao studied macaque monkeys to investigate what factors influence color in the brain. They propose that when added together with previous research, their results suggest that a connected ventral-stream pathway (including at least V1, V2, V4, and a region on the posterior bank of the superior temporal sulcus called PITd) is responsible for determining color.

Bevil R. Conway, Doris Y. Tsao. (2006). Color Architecture in Alert Macaque Cortex Revealed by fMRI. Cerebral Cortex, 16(11), 1604-13. Retrieved April 25, 2008, from ProQuest Psychology Journals database. (Document ID: 1137287041).