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Seeing the movement: our visual brain at work

By on Feb 18, 2017 in Vision | 2 comments

Having discussed how painters tackled the problem of representing motion in art, we can, therefore, ask ourselves the following question: how is this type of information processed in our brain? On a different occasion, we will describe the stream of visual information from the retina via the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) to the posterior pole of the occipital lobe, which contains the primary visual cortex (V1). From V1, information flows along two channels: a ventral pathway extending towards the temporal lobe and a more dorsal pathway, that projects towards the parietal lobe (see figure below). The ventral stream of information is mainly concerned with establishing identities and building categories of visual objects. Running in an anterior direction from the occipital lobe, neurons lying along this pathway are selectively activated by increasingly more complex visual stimuli....