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Colour vision

A patchwork of cones

Nature volume 397, pages 473–475 (1999)Cite this article

If you look closely at the screen of a colour television, you'll see a precise mosaic of red, green and blue pixels. At a normal viewing distance, however, our eyes cannot resolve these individual pixels and, depending on their relative intensities, we perceive thousands of different colours. Television screens (and now PC monitors) are the most popular applications of the Young-Helmholtz theory of trichromacy1, which states that human colour vision is based on three types of cone in the retina. Yet over 100 years after Helmholtz formulated his ideas, we have a paradox. Although engineers can construct perfect colour monitors, neurobiologists still do not know the details of the circuit that subserves trichromatic colour vision in humans, despite contributions from psychophysics, histology, electrophysiology, spectroscopy and molecular genetics. Now, on page 520 of this issue, Roorda and Williams2 go some way towards addressing this problem.

Why do we not know more about human trichromacy? For one, there is no other species of animal whose retina could serve as a model. Birds, reptiles and fishes have elaborate colour vision, but their retinas differ greatly from those in primates. Many mammals have an evolutionarily ancient, dichromatic form of colour vision, but there are no known mammalian trichromates besides the primates (monkeys, apes and man)3.

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Figure 1: Organization of the retina in different animals.

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  1. the Max Planck Institut füsr Hirnforschung, Deutschordenstrasse 46, D-60528, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

    Heinz Wässle

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  1. Heinz Wässle
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Wässle, H. A patchwork of cones. Nature 397, 473–475 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/17216

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