![]() |
New findings suggest more similarities in the general principles of color discrimination in mice and primates than previously thought [Credit: Web] |
Researchers found that when stimulated with light, ganglion cells that have never before been implicated in color vision become color-opponent if they are located close to the border between the green- and the blue-dominated retina halves, but nowhere else. Their findings show that color vision can arise from neural circuits in the retina that are not specifically "wired" for color processing.
Although these findings were made in mice, they represent an important contribution to our understanding of color processing in humans and other primates, which are considered the color specialists among the mammals. Such random wiring has long been proposed for primate red-green color vision, which resulted from a gene duplication event that occurred quite recently on an evolutionary time scale -- possibly leaving not enough time for a specific neural circuit to evolve. The new findings support this idea and suggest more similarities in the general principles of color discrimination in mice and primates than previously thought.
In addition to the financial support from the CIN, the work was made possible by the Research Unit "Dynamics and Stability of Retinal Processing" (FOR701) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Source: Universitaet Tübingen [February 11, 2013]