Tetrachromatic Color Vision

The term“tetrachromacy” describes the physiological possession of four different classes of simultaneously functioning retinal photopigments (also called “weak tetrachromacy”). From an empirical standpoint, tetrachromatic color vision (or “strong tetrachromacy”) additionally requires demonstrating that mixtures of four independent appropriately chosen primary lights will simulate all distinctions in appearance possible in visible color space. Independence of the primary lights implies that no mixtures of any subset of these lights (or their intensity variants) will produce an identical match to any combination of mixtures of the remaining lights. By comparison, trichromacy empirically requires only three primaries to simulate all visible colors. Established theory states that normal color vision humans are trichromats (as, primarily, are Old World monkeys and apes). The first element of trichromacy is the output from three simultaneously functioning retinal cone classes: Short-, Medium-, and LongWavelenth Sensitive (SWS, MWS, & LWS) cones. Three cone classes alone do not establish a trichromat color code, however. A postreceptoral code for three categories of signal is also needed. A standard vision science assumption is that the postreceptoral recoding of cone outputs initiates the neural trivariant (or trichromatic) property of human color perception, and the need for only three primary lights to match any test light.