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Visual Pathways
When we use our vision, our brains are doing an enormously complex task. Amanda Albon describes two of the vision pathways used in the brain and explains their structure and function.
It may not be immediately obvious why psychologists study vision at all. After all, seeing feels effortless (we do not have to make an effort to see) and seems so simple. Yet vision is one of the most researched senses, with good reason. For a start, human vision is highly developed and we study it because we are interested in ourselves. We can also explain part of our mind by explaining vision, as our feeling of being conscious is largely visual (we ‘wake up’ when we open our eyes).
Although vision feels effortless, it is enormously complex, with many requirements (processing depth, colour, shape and motion). The fact that about half of the cerebral cortex (outer layer of the brain) is devoted to processing just visual information shows how demanding it is. Our vision feels easy because our brain breaks the problem down; it spreads vision across many separate visual areas and pathways, each specialising in different tasks. This article focuses on just two of these pathways…
This is an extract from Albon,A. (2007) Visual Pathways. Psychology Review, 13(1). Philip Allan Updates/Hodder Education: Deddington, UK. ISSN: 1750-3469. It is reproduced with the kind permission of Philip Allan Updates.
