Signals for color and achromatic contrast in the goldfish inner retina

A moving stimulus paradigm was designed to investigate color contrast encoding in the retina. Recently, this paradigm yielded suggestive evidence for color contrast encoding in zebrafish but the significance and generality remain uncertain since the properties of color coding in the zebrafish inner retina are largely unknown. Here, the question of color contrast is pursued in the goldfish retina where there is much accumulated evidence for retinal mechanisms of color vision and opponent color-coding, in particular. Recordings of a sensitive local field potential of the inner retina, the proximal negative response, were made in the intact, superfused retina in the light-adapted state. Responses to color contrast and achromatic contrast were analyzed by comparing responses to a green moving bar on green versus red backgrounds. The quantitative form of the irradiance/response curves was distinctly different under a range of conditions in 32 retinas, thereby providing robust evidence for red–green color contrast. The color contrast is based on successive contrast, occurs in the absence of overt color opponency, and clearly differs from previous findings in the goldfish retina for simultaneous color contrast mediated by color-opponent neurons. The form of the irradiance/response curves suggests that successive color contrast is particularly important when achromatic contrast is low, as often occurs in natural environments. The present results provide a parallel with the well-known principle of human color vision, first proposed by Kirschmann as the third law of color contrast, and may also have implications for the evolution of vertebrate color vision.