Visual cortex

The visual cortex is a part of the brain that allows vision. It is relatively thin – between 1.5mm and 2mm in humans. In monkeys and apes the visual cortex takes up much of their brain. Physically, the visual cortex is at the back of the brain in the occipital lobe.

David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel did research on the visual cortex for many years. They won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries about information processing in the visual system.

1. Their work in the 1960s and 1970s was on how the visual system developed. They worked on parts of the visual cortex of the brain which get signals from the right or left eye.
2. Their work describing how signals from the eye are processed by the brain to generate edge detectors, motion detectors, stereoscopic depth detectors and colour detectors. These are building blocks of the visual scene.

Research on the primary visual cortex can involve recording action potentials from electrodes within the brain of cats, ferrets, rats, mice, or monkeys. Alternatively, signals can be recorded outside the animal by EEG, MEG, or fMRI. These techniques gather information without invading the brain.