V4

From Psy3242

V4 is a visual processing area in the ventral "what" stream (responsible for object recognition and form representation). It is thought to be a major color processing center of the brain; Sacks describes it as possessing a "higher-order, color-generating mechanism" (34). Recently, however, research has come out to question this area's role as the processing center for color, pointing to a different area, sometimes called the "human V4" or V8, as responsible for our processing of color. In fact, a study by Sperling et al. in 2006 found that both areas are activated when color-grapheme synaesthetic subjects are shown letters.