Neural Mechanisms of Visual Perception

It is more than half a century ago since Keffer H Hartline published his classical receptive fields studies of single optic nerve fibres in the frog. World War II intervened and the full impact of his work did not become apparent until the early fifties, when Horace Barlow extended Hartline's analysis in the frog and Stephen W Kuffler showed the on-centre and off-centre type ganglion cells in the cat retina. The next advances were made in the late fifties when Jerome Lettvin and Humberto Maturana described cells in the frog tectum with very complex response properties and when David Hubel and I discovered that cells in the cat striate cortex were sensitive to orientation of contours and binocular stimulation. Vision research has gone a long distance since that time—nonetheless we have just begun the long journey towards a detailed mechanistic understanding of the neural basis of visual perception. In this lecture I discuss the processing of visual information at the level of the striate cortex in the cat and monkey, and describe technical advances that have greatly facilitated the analysis of the neural mechanisms of visual perception.