The Role of the Primate Extrastriate Area V4 in Vision

Area V4 is a part of the primate visual cortex. Its role in vision has been extensively debated. Inferences about the functions of this area have now been made by examination of a broad range of visual capacities after ablation of V4 in rhesus monkeys. The results obtained suggest that this area is involved in more complex aspects of visual information processing than had previously been suggested. Monkeys had particularly severe deficits in situations where the task was to select target stimuli that had a lower contrast, smaller size, or slower rate of motion than the array of comparison stimuli from which they had to be discriminated. Extensive training on each specific task resulted in improved performance. However, after V4 ablation, the monkeys could not generalize the specific task to new stimulus configurations and to new spatial locations.