Object Perception: Physiology

Object perception or object recognition is the process in which visual input is assigned a meaningful interpretation that is available to perceptual awareness. It is fundamental to our ability to interpret and act in the world. Object perception is thought to occur through computations across a hierarchy of processing stages in the visual cortex, named the ventral visual pathway. This pathway begins in the primary visual cortex, area V1 in the occipital lobe, and ascends to regions in the lateral occipital cortex and the ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Damage (such as lesions, stroke, disease) to higher level visual areas in this pathway leads to specific deficits in object perception, such as the inability to recognize objects (object agnosia) and/or inability to recognize faces (pros-opagnosia), while not ...