The visual cortex is the region of the cerebral cortex, located in the occipital lobe, that receives, processes, and interprets visual information relayed from the retina. Signals travel from retinal ganglion cells through the optic nerve and tract to the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus, then via the opti…
The visual cortex is the region of the cerebral cortex, located in the occipital lobe, that receives, processes, and interprets visual information relayed from the retina. Signals travel from retinal ganglion cells through the optic nerve and tract to the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus, then via the optic radiations to the primary visual cortex (V1, or striate cortex) surrounding the calcarine sulcus. V1 is organized retinotopically and contains neurons selective for features such as orientation, spatial frequency, motion direction, binocular disparity, and color, arranged in ocular dominance and orientation columns. From V1, processing extends to higher extrastriate areas (V2 through V5/MT and beyond) that are broadly divided into a ventral stream supporting object and form recognition and a dorsal stream supporting spatial localization and visually guided action. Through hierarchical and recurrent processing, together with top-down modulation, these areas extract increasingly complex attributes and integrate them into coherent perception. The functional architecture of the visual cortex can be probed with electrophysiology, computational modeling of neuronal response properties, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, the latter mapping cortical activation to visual stimuli. Altered cortical responses are implicated in conditions affecting perception, and optical defects such as astigmatism can influence the patterns of visual cortical activity.
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