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5 - Adventures into Terra Incognita

Probing the Neural Circuits along the Ventral Visual Stream

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2021

Gabriel Kreiman
Gabriel Kreiman
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

Around the 1950s, a wealth of behavioral experiments had characterized many phenomenological aspects of visual perception that begged for a mechanistic explanation (Chapter 3). Lesion studies had provided a compelling case that damage to circumscribed brain regions led to specific visual processing deficits (Chapter 4). These lesion studies pointed to specific brain areas to investigate visual processing, especially the primary visual cortex in the back of the brain. In addition, the successful use of microelectrode electrical recordings had led to direct insights about the function of neurons within the retinal circuitry (Chapter 2). The time was ripe to open the black box of the brain and begin to think about how vision emerges from the spiking activity of neurons in the cortex.

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Chapter
Information
Biological and Computer Vision , pp. 87 - 111
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

• Carandini, M.; Demb., J. B.; Mante, V.; Tolhurst, D. J.; Dan, Y., et al. (2005). Do we know what the early visual system does? Journal of Neuroscience 25: 10577–10597.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
• Hubel, D.H.; and Wiesel, T. N. (1968). Receptive fields and functional architecture of monkey striate cortex. The Journal of Physiology 195: 215–243.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
• Kremkow, J.; Jin, J.; Wang, Y.; and Alonso, J. M. (2016). Principles underlying sensory map topography in primary visual cortex. Nature 533: 52–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
• Markov, N.T.; Ercsey-Ravasz, M. M.; Ribeiro Gomes, A. R.; Lamy, C.; Magrou, L., et al. (2014). A weighted and directed interareal connectivity matrix for macaque cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cortex 24: 17–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
• Schmolesky, M.; Wang, Y.; Hanes, D.; Thompson, K.; Leutgeb, S.; et al. (1998). Signal timing across the macaque visual system. Journal of Neurophysiology 79: 3272–3278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

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