Bongard and Smirnov on the tetrachromacy of extra-foveal vision

Abstract

In Moscow in the 1950′s, the physicist M. M. Bongard developed the use of silent substitution to establish the number of dimensions of human or animal colour vision and to derive colour-matching functions either for whole organisms or for individual neuronal channels. In 1956, he and his colleague M. S. Smirnov reported that extra-foveal human vision was tetrachromatic when tested by the silent-substitution method that they called ‘replacement colorimetry’. In the steady state, trichromatic matches were possible in extra-foveal regions, but transients were visible when one such match was replaced by another. If, however, a match was made with four primaries, then a silent substitution was possible; and such matches – unlike trichromatic ones – were stable with light level and with changes in the state of chromatic adaptation. Bongard and Smirnov believed that the fourth receptor had the spectral sensitivity of the rods, but of course they were working long before the discovery of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. On the fiftieth anniversary of Bongard’s grievous death, we provide a translation of Bongard and Smirnov’s paper on the tetrachromacy of extra-foveal vision. In a commentary, we give the background to their work and provide further details of their apparatus and procedure. We briefly discuss related research and the reception in the West of Bongard and Smirnov’s claims. We suggest that an analogy can be made between the tetrachromacy of the parafovea and the ‘weak tetrachromacy’ of heterozygotes for anomalous colour vision, whose trichromatic matches are not stable with chromatic adaptation.