Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The eye and forming the image
- 3 Retinal colour vision
- 4 The organisation of the visual system
- 5 Primary visual cortex
- 6 Visual development: an activity-dependent process
- 7 Colour constancy
- 8 Object perception and recognition
- 9 Face recognition and interpretation
- 10 Motion perception
- 11 Brain and space
- 12 What is perception?
- References
- Index
- Plate sections
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The eye and forming the image
- 3 Retinal colour vision
- 4 The organisation of the visual system
- 5 Primary visual cortex
- 6 Visual development: an activity-dependent process
- 7 Colour constancy
- 8 Object perception and recognition
- 9 Face recognition and interpretation
- 10 Motion perception
- 11 Brain and space
- 12 What is perception?
- References
- Index
- Plate sections
Summary
A user's guide?
The aim of this book is to provide a concise, but detailed account of how your visual system is organised and functions to produce visual perception. There have been a host of new advances in our understanding of how our visual system is organised. These new discoveries stretch from the structural basis of the visual pigments that capture light to the neural basis of higher visual function.
In the past few years, the application of the techniques of molecular genetics have allowed us to determine the genetic and structural basis of the molecules that make up the photopigments, and the faults that can arise and produce visual deficits such as colour blindness, night blindness and retinitis pigmentosa. Careful analysis has also allowed the changes in cell chemistry that convert the absorption of light by the photopigment into a neural signal to be understood. The use of functional imaging techniques, in concert with more traditional techniques such as micro-electrode recording, have made it possible to understand how visual information is processed in the brain. This processing seems to be both parallel and hierarchical. Visual information is split into its different component parts such as colour, motion, orientation, texture, shape and depth, and these are analysed in parallel in separate areas, each specialised for this particular visual feature. The processed information is then reassembled into a single coherent perception of our visual world in subsequent, higher visual areas.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- An Introduction to the Visual System , pp. 1 - 17Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008