The effects of V4 lesions on the visual abilities of macaques: shape discrimination

Monkeys with bilateral ablation of cortical visual area V4 were compared with unoperated controls for their ability to relearn postoperatively a series of preoperatively acquired two-choice visual discrimination problems. The animals with V4 lesions were impaired on relearning to discriminate between different shapes, and discrimination between identical shapes presented at different orientations was also impaired. Some of the deficits were consistent with disrupting the input to inferotemporal cortex, but discrimination of a subset of the stimuli is known to be unaffected by inferotemporal cortex lesions and could not be explained in the same way. To clarify the nature of the deficit, and to test the hypothesis that shapes differing in orientation are analyzed in the occipitoparietal processing pathway, animals with V4 lesions were also compared to normals on their ability to acquire a version of the landmark task. The V4 animals performed as well as the control animals on this task. The results suggest that V4 is important for the shape discrimination abilities that survive inferotemporal cortex lesions. The role of V4 in shape analysis is discussed in the light of recent evidence that V4 neurones are modulated by visual attention.