Recent advances in color vision research

Abstract

The remarkable variation in color vision both among and within primate species is receiving increasing attention from geneticists, psychophysicists, physiologists, and behavioral ecologists. It is known that color vision ability affects foraging behavior. Color vision is also likely to have implications for predation avoidance, social behavior, mate choice, and group dynamics, and should also influence the choice of stimuli for cognitive experiments. Therefore, understanding the color vision of a study species is important and of particular significance to scientists studying species with polymorphic color vision (most platyrrhines and some strepsirrhines). The papers in this issue were inspired by a symposium held during the 20th Congress of the International Primatological Society at Turin, Italy, in August 2004. The aim of the symposium was to bring together research from a range of disciplines, using recent methodological advances in molecular, modeling, and experimental techniques, to help elucidate the evolution, ecological importance, and distribution of color vision genotypes and phenotypes. The symposium achieved its aim, and as with most research in expanding disciplines, there are surprises and many questions still to be answered. Further advances will be made using a combination of different approaches involving analyses at the level of molecules, types of cell and neural networks, detailed and long-term field work, modeling, and carefully controlled experimentation.