Specificity and selectivity of chromatic visual evoked potentials

A paper by Rabin et al. (1994) Vision Research, 34, 2657-2671, claimed that spatially extensive grating stimuli could be used to generate chromatic-specific visual evoked potentials from subjects assumed to have standard spectral sensitivity and tritanopic confusion lines. Here we demonstrate that such spatially extensive stimuli may generate responses which are contaminated by luminance-contrast intrusions. Such intrusions are mainly due to chromatic aberrations and are compounded by the abovementioned assumptions. Claims regarding the chromatic selectivity of VEPs must, therefore, be substantiated by establishing correlations with the known properties of the chromatic system.