Grant: Project Grant

The understanding of human colour vision is a challenge that has interested scientists for over 300 years. The core of the problem is to understand how the spectral differences across the visual scene in the physical world are translated by the brain into the neural signals that represent the wide array of colours that we see in our perceptual world; in other words, how the human brain sees in colour. It is well known that there are two major subdivisions in the human visual system. The dorsal pathway is dedicated to visual guidance of our actions and motion through the visual world, whereas the ventral pathway encodes what we see in terms of the shapes and objects in the visual scene. In this proposal I investigate the role of the ventral pathway in the encoding of form and colour. I aim to identify which pathways and brain areas are used to encode colour as compared to the achromatic (black & white) components of the visual image, and how colour, form and shape analyses are combined within the brain. The research uses the latest techniques, including fMRI of the human brain and brain stimulation (TMS), to identify how the brain regions and pathways are functionally organized to deconstruct the visual image and then reform it into global percepts, enabling us to see the coloured version of the visual world that we so easily take for granted.