Readings and References

Most books on vision and perception cover the material in this chapter. For a well illustrated and very readable account of the work of Hubel and Wiesel, the book by Hubel himself (1988) is recommended. The neuroanatomist Semir Zeki made great contributions to the discovery and mapping of the extrastriate areas, and his review article (1992) and book (1993) provide a good account of this.

Papers on specific issues

Striate cortex: For a recent overview of what might be going on in there, see Kang et al. (2003). For those with a more neurobiological bent, Priebe et al. (2004) discuss the difference between simple and complex cells in more detail.

Orientation selectivity: Ever since the seminal findings of Hubel and Wiesel (Hubel, 1963; ; Hubel and Wiesel, 1977) their 'simple' feed-forward model of how cells become orientation selective has been challenged and supported in turn. Some more recent papers on this are Reid and Alonso (1996) and Shapley et al. (2003), which will also point you to the many earlier studies of this issue.

Face cells: The finding of cells that seem to respond to very complex stimuli such as faces is well summarized by Damasio et al. (1990), along with some of the many difficulties in how to interpret the finding of such experiments.

Grandmother cells (gnostic units): The seminal paper in this area is Barlow (1972). More recent musings from Lennie (1998) are well worth the time and effort. There are also now models of how cells can become sensitive to a particular object and are able to recognize this object over many different views and sizes, while not responding to other objects. The data from IT cells on this issue can be found in Logothetis et al. (1995) and a model of how it might be done can be found in Riesenhuber and Poggio (1999).

Multiple cortical areas: It's hard to keep up with the rapidly changing picture of the many visual areas, so we haven't tried. A view of the human areas is given by Tootell et al. (1996) and Chklovskii and Koulakov (2004), but this is an area where you may want to get something even more up-to-date than our textbook can offer.

Oscillations: Though the topic is not covered in this chapter, some people have claimed that the various aspects of an object, such as its colour, movement, and so on, are brought together by the cells involved all firing in synchrony. For a review and critique of this idea, see Usrey and Reid (1999).

Peripheral vision: Most research tells us about what happens in central vision: the point at which we are directly looking: while peripheral vision has been sadly neglected. However, this is not totally true and Anstis (1998) is definitely worth reading if you want to see what's going on out there, away from where you're looking.

References

Andrews, T. J., Halpern, S. D., and Purves, D. (1997). Correlated size variations in human visual cortex, lateral geniculate nucleus and optic tract. Journal of Neuroscience 17, 2859-2868 [PubMed: 9092607]

Anstis, S. (1998). Picturing peripheral acuity. Perception 27, 817-825. [PubMed: 10209644]  ↑

Barlow, H. B. (1972). Single units and sensation: a cell doctrine for perceptual psychology? Perception 1, 371-394. [PubMed: 4377168]  ↑

Chklovskii, D. B. and Koulakov, A. A. (2004). Maps in the brain: What can we learn from them? Annual Review of Neuroscience 27, 369-392. [PubMed: 15217337] [DOI: 10.1146/annurev.neuro.27.070203.144226]  ↑

Damasio, A. R., Tranel, D., and Damasio, H. (1990). Face agnosia and the neural substrates of memory. Annual Review of Neuroscience 13, 89-109. [PubMed: 2183687] [DOI: 10.1146/annurev.ne.13.030190.000513]  ↑

Frisby, J. P. (1979) Seeing: illusion, brain and mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gross, C. G., Bender, D. B., and Rocha-Miranda, C. E. (1969) Visual receptive fields of neurons in inferotemporal cortex of the monkey. Science 166, 1303-1306. [PubMed: 4982685]

Hadjikhani, N. and Tootell, R. B. H. (2000). Projection of rods and cones within human visual cortex. Human Brain Mapping 9, 55-63. [PubMed: 10643730] [DOI: 10.1002/%28SICI%291097-0193%282000%299%3A1%3C55%3A%3AAID-HBM6%3E3.3.CO%3B2-L]

Hubel, D. H. and Wiesel, T. N. (1977). Ferrier lecture on functional architecture of macaque monkey visual cortex. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 198, 1-56.  ↑

Hubel, D. H. (1963). The visual cortex of the brain. Scientific American 209, November, 54-62. [PubMed: 14075682]  ↑

Hubel, D. H. (1988) Eye, brain and vision. Scientific American Library. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

Kang, K. J., Shelley, M., and Sompolinsky, H. (2003). Mexican hats and pinwheels in visual cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 100(5), 2848-2853. [PubMed: 12601163] [DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0138051100]  ↑

Lennie, P. (1998). Single units and visual cortical organization. Perception 27, 889-935. [PubMed: 10209632]  ↑

Lettvinn, J. Y., Maturana, H. R., McCulloch, W. S., and Pitts, W. H. (1959). What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain. Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 47, 1940-1951.

Logothetis, N., Pauls, J., and Poggio, T. (1995). Shape representation in the inferior temporal cortex of monkeys. Current Biology 5, 552-563. [PubMed: 7583105] [DOI: 10.1016/S0960-9822%2895%2900108-4]  ↑

Nicholls, J. G., Martin, A. R., and Wallace, B. G. (1992). From neuron to brain, 3rd edn., Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.

Obermayer, K. and Blasdel, G. G. (1993) Geometry of orientation and ocular dominance columns in monkey striate cortex. Journal of Neuroscience 12, 4114-4129.

Priebe, N. J., Mechler, F., Carandini, M., and Ferster, D. (2004). The contribution of spike threshold to the dichotomy of cortical simple and complex cells. Nature Neuroscience 7(10), 1113-1122. [PubMed: 15338009] [DOI: 10.1038/nn1310]  ↑

Reid, R. C. and Alonso, J.-M. (1996). The processing and encoding of information in the visual cortex. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 6, 475-480. [PubMed: 8794104] [DOI: 10.1016/S0959-4388%2896%2980052-3]  ↑

Riesenhuber, M. and Poggio, T. (1999). Hierarchical models of object recognition in cortex. Nature Neuroscience 2, 1019-1025. [PubMed: 10526343] [DOI: 10.1038/14819]  ↑

Shapley, R., Hawken, M., and Ringach, D. L. (2003). Dynamics of orientation selectivity in the primary visual cortex and the importance of cortical inhibition. Cell 38(5), 689-699.  ↑

Tootell, R. B. H., Dale, A. M., Sereno, M. I., and Malach, R. (1996). New images from human visual cortex. Trends in Neurosciences 19, 481-489. [PubMed: 8931274] [DOI: 10.1016/S0166-2236%2896%2910053-9]  ↑

Usrey, W. M. and Reid, R. C. (1999). Synchronous activity in the visual system. Annual Review of Physiology 61, 435-456. [PubMed: 10099696] [DOI: 10.1146/annurev.physiol.61.1.435]  ↑

Zeki, S. (1992). The visual image in mind and brain. Scientific American 267, September, 42-50.

Zeki, S. (1993) A vision of the brain. Oxford: Blackwell.