Parallel gain modulation mechanisms set the resolution of color selectivity in human visual cortex

Abstract

Color discrimination is fundamental to human behavior. We find bananas by coarsely searching for yellow but then differentiate nuances of yellow to pick the best exemplars. How does the brain adjust the resolution of color selectivity to our changing needs? Here, we analyze the brain magnetic response in the human visual cortex to show that color selectivity is adaptively set by coarse- and fine-resolving processes running in parallel at different hierarchical levels. Those include a gain enhancement in the higher-lever cortex of color units tuned away from the target to resolve very similar colors and a coarsely resolving gain enhancement in the mid-level cortex of units tuned to the target. Our findings suggest that attention operates on a form of multiresolution representation of color at different levels in the visual hierarchy, which keeps selectivity adaptive to a changing resolution context.