Adaptive modulation of color salience contingent upon global form coding and task relevance

Extensive research on local color aftereffects has revealed perceptual consequences of opponent color coding in the retina and the LGN, and of orientation-and/or spatial-frequency-contingent color coding in early cortical visual areas (e.g., V1 and V2). Here, we report a color aftereffect that depends crucially on global-form-contingent color processing. Brief viewing of colored items (passively viewed, ignored, or attended) reduced the salience of the previewed color in a subsequent task of color-based visual search. This color-salience aftereffect was relatively insensitive to variations (between color preview and search) in local image features, but was substantially affected by changes in global configuration (e.g. the presence or absence of perceptual unitization); the global-form dependence of the aftereffect was also modulated by task demands. The overall results suggest that (1) color salience is adaptively modulated (from fixation to fixation), drawing attention to a new color in visual-search contexts, and (2) these modulations seem to be mediated by global-form-and-color-selective neural processing in mid to late stages of the ventral visual pathway (e.g., V4 and IT), in combination with task-dependent feedback from higher cortical areas (e.g., prefrontal cortex).