Chapter 3: Visual Pathways
Learning Objectives
- Trace the complete pathway of visual information from the retinal ganglion cells to the primary visual cortex, identifying key structures including the optic nerve, optic chiasm, lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), and primary visual cortex (V1).
- Explain how visual information from the left and right visual fields is organized at the optic chiasm, including which parts of the brain process information from each visual field.
- Describe the layered organization of the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), including how information from each eye is distributed across its six layers and the concept of retinotopic mapping.
- Explain how information from the LGN enters and is organized within the different layers of the primary visual cortex, particularly focusing on the role of layer IV.
- Compare and contrast the two types of columns in the primary visual cortex (orientation columns and ocular dominance columns), explaining how they organize visual information.
- Define and explain the concept of a ‘hypercolumn’ in the primary visual cortex, including what types of visual information it represents.
- Label where our primary visual cortex (V1) is located.
- Know how the V1 neurons are organized according to their receptive fields in visual space (retinotopic organization).
- Describe cortical magnification in V1.
- Describe how the V1 neurons are organized according to eye of origin.
- Describe how the V1 neurons are organized according to their orientation preferences (depth vs surface).
- Describe what V1 hypercolumns are.
- Describe the what and where pathways
- Describe specialized areas in both the what and where pathways
- Describe the importance of motion in scene segmentation.
- Define the aperture problem, motion coherence and optic flow and the brain areas that are responsible for these
- Explain the function and location of mirror neurons
