Discrimination of luminance and chromaticity differences by dichromatic and trichromatic monkeys.

Dichromatic and trichromatic representatives from two genera of platyrrhine monkeys that show widespread color vision polymorphism (Saguinus--tamarins, Saimiri--squirrel monkeys) were tested for their abilities to make increment-threshold and flicker discriminations based on luminance and chromaticity differences. The details of these tests were arranged to attempt to emphasize the relative contributions to visual behavior of non-opponent and spectrally-opponent neural mechanisms. The results indicate that dichromatic and trichromatic monkeys differ only trivially on tests where performance is based on the contributions of non-opponent mechanisms, that the contribution of spectrally opponent mechanisms to the "brightness signal" is very similar in trichromatic and dichromatic monkeys, and that in increment-threshold discriminations where there are both chromaticity and luminance cues some test wavelengths yield superior performance for trichromats while others appear to favor the dichromat.