V2 thin stripes contain spatially organized representations of achromatic luminance change.

A considerable amount of research over the last decades has focused on the apparent specialization of V2 thin stripes for the processing of color in diurnal primates. However, because V2 thin stripes are functionally heterogeneous in that they consist of largely separate color- and luminance-preferring domains and because the color-preferring domains contain a systematic representation of hue, we hypothesized that they contained functional maps that subserve luminance processing. Here we show, using optical imaging of intrinsic cortical signals and microelectrode recording, that the V2 thin stripe luminance-preferring domains contain spatially segregated modules that encode the direction of relative luminance change. Quantitative analysis of the cortical responses to luminance increments or decrements indicates that these luminance-sensitive modules also encode the magnitude of the luminance change by the magnitude of the evoked cortical response. These results demonstrate an important role of V2 thin stripes in the processing of luminance and thus suggest that thin stripes are involved in the overall processing of the surface properties of objects rather than simply the processing of color.