Retrieval of color and form during suppression of temporal cortex with cold.

Five cryodes were implanted on each side over the dorsal aspect of inferotemporal cortex (TEd) of three monkeys. They were trained on a form discrimination and three color discriminations. Suppression of TEd with cold disrupted retrieval of the color, but not the form discriminations. The animals could find the colors in a background of shifting values of gray, indicating that the suppression did not reduce their color perception to gray. They initially had great difficulty matching red to red and green to green, although that recovered with experience. The animals tended to respond to one or the other of the colors, indicating that they could perceive and discriminate them, but, either lost information about the correct stimulus, or something from past experience was interfering with performance. We suggested that cooling TEd suppresses new and recent learning of color discriminations, but it does not suppress some previous experience that intrudes upon performance of new tasks. TEd might contain episodic information about colors necessary for performance of the immediate task.