What is the visual cortex?
Q: What is the visual cortex?
A: The visual cortex is a part of the brain that allows vision. It is located in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain and is relatively thin, between 1.5mm and 2mm in humans.
Q: Who did research on the visual cortex?
A: 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.
Q: What kind of research did they do?
A: 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 either eye, describing how signals from these eyes are processed by the brain to generate edge detectors, motion detectors, stereoscopic depth detectors and colour detectors - building blocks of a visual scene.
Q: How can researchers study primary visual cortex activity?
A: Research on primary visual cortex activity can involve recording action potentials from electrodes within an animal's brain (cats, ferrets, rats, mice or monkeys). Alternatively, signals can be recorded outside an animal using EEG, MEG or fMRI techniques which gather information without invading its brain.
Q: How thick is human's Visual Cortex?
A: Human's Visual Cortex is relatively thin - between 1.5mm and 2mm thick.
Q: What award did Hubel and Wiesel win for their discoveries about information processing in Visual System?
A: David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel won 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries about information processing in Visual System
