Bosten, J. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2022

Colour vision is aligned with natural scene statistics at 4-months of age

Visual perception in adult humans is thought to be optimised to represent the statistical regularities of natural scenes (Parraga et al., 2000; Simoncelli, 2003). For example, in adults, visual sensitivity to different hues shows an asymmetry which coincides with the statistical regularities of colour in the natural world (Bosten et al., 2015). Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities in social and linguistic stimuli, but whether or not infants visual systems are tuned to natural scene statistics is currently unclear. We measured colour discrimination in infants to investigate whether or not the visual system can represent chromatic scene statistics in very early life. Our results reveal the earliest association between vision and natural scene statistics that has yet been found: even as young as four months of age, colour vision is aligned with the distributions of colours in natural scenes. Research HighlightsO_LIWe find infants hue sensitivity is aligned with the distribution of colours in the natural world, as it is in adults C_LIO_LIAt just 4 months, infants visual systems are tailored to extract and represent the statistical regularities of the natural world C_LIO_LIThis points to a drive for the human brain to represent statistical regularities even at a young age. C_LI

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Color-biased regions in the ventral visual pathway are food-selective

The ventral visual pathway is well known to be involved in recognizing and categorizing objects (Kanwisher and Dilks, 2013). Three color-biased areas have also been found between face and place selective areas in the ventral visual pathway (Lafer-Sousa et al., 2016). To understand the function of these color-biased areas in a region known for object recognition, we analyzed the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD; Allen et al., 2022), a large 7T fMRI dataset from 8 participants who viewed up to 30,000 trials of images of colored natural scenes. In a whole-brain analysis, we correlated the average color saturation of the images and the voxel responses, revealing color-biased areas that diverge into two streams in the ventral visual pathway, beginning in V4 and extending medially and laterally of the Fusiform Face Area in both hemispheres. We drew regions of interest (ROIs) for the two streams and found that the images for each ROI that evoked the largest responses had certain characteristics: They contained food, contained circular objects, had higher color saturation, contained warmer hues, and had more luminance entropy. A multiple linear regression showed that the presence of food in images was the strongest predictor of voxel responses in the medial and lateral color-biased regions for all eight participants, but that color saturation also contributed independently to voxel responses. Our results show that these areas are food-selective and color biased. We suggest that these streams might be involved in using color to recognize and judge the properties of food.

neuroscience↗