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(NAS Colloquium) Vision From Photon to Perception (1999) / Chapter Skim
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Primate photopigments and primate color vision
Pages 21-25

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From page 21...
... §1734 solely to indicate this fact. variations in the number of types of cone pigment found in the retina normally map directly into the dimensionality of color vision as defined by the standard behavioral test of color matching i.e., two classes of cone pigment underlie dichromatic color vision; three classes of cone pigment yield trichromatic color vision.
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From page 22...
... In a thorough series of psychophysical experiments, Alpern and his colleagues documented these individual variations in color matching, and in so doing convincingly demonstrated that they must be attributed to individual variations in the spectral positioning of the M and L cone pigments (reviewed in ref.
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From page 23...
... The clear variations in the pigments of the New World monkeys suggested it would be profitable to correlate spectral positioning with sequence differences among several different phenotypic versions of the M and L cone pigments in these animals. Accordingly, we made sequence comparisons for a total of eight different opsin genes, six from two species of New World monkey and two from human dichromats (44~.
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From page 24...
... Some contemporary primates conform to this norm; others would be this way except that mutational changes have rendered their S-cone opsin gene nonfunctional. Molecular comparisons of cone opsin genes suggest that the divergence that led to two separate M and L cone pigments occurred about 30 million years ago (17, 55~.
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From page 25...
... (1987) in Frontiers of Visual Science: Proceedings of the 1985 Symposium, eds.
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Key Terms

  • world monkeys
  • cone pigments
  • trichromatic color
  • opsin genes
  • dichromatic color

  • vision res
  • cone pigment
  • primate color
  • cone opsin
  • opsin gene

  • individual variations
  • vision defects
  • spectral positioning
  • cone photopigments
  • human cone

  • color matching
  • individual animals
  • acid substitutions
  • spectrally distinct
  • functional utility

  • human subjects
  • substantial variations
  • amino acid
  • vision emerges
  • world monkey

  • absorption spectra
  • pigment found
  • nocturnal primates
  • normal human
  • recent work


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