Visual System Structure

Humans and other animals that rely principally on their sense of sight to perceive their environment have highly evolved visual systems. The visual system consists of billions of connections within and between many visual areas in the brain. The information that traverses these connections operates almost entirely beneath levels of consciousness, such that individuals can observe, plan, and act within their environments with extreme precision. This entry describes feedforward and feedback flow, parallel processing streams, and the visual system structure.

Feedforward and Feedback Flow

Upon first examination, the visual system appears to be organized in a serial fashion. In other words, “lower” visual brain areas connect to “higher” areas in a hierarchical progression. The term feedforward relates to this idea that visual information is fed forward from ...

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