Artificial cognitive models and computational neuroscience methods have garnered great interest from both neurologist and leading analysts in recent years. Among the cognitive models, HMAX has been widely used in computer vision systems for its robustness shape and texture features inspired by the ventral stream of the human brain. This work presents a Color-HMAX (C-HMAX) model based on the HMAX model which imitates the color vision mechanism of the human brain that the HMAX model does not include. C-HMAX is then applied to the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB) which has 43 categories and 51 840 sample traffic signs with an accuracy of 98.41%, higher than most other models including linear discriminant analysis and multi-scale convolutional neural network.