Research Article: Primates, Visual Perception and Memory in Nonhuman

Anatomical and physiological studies have revealed at least thirty separate areas with visual functions in the cortex of monkeys, and there could be even more visual areas in the cortex of humans. One view of the division of labor among the visual areas holds that there are two main processing systems: one devoted to identifying what an object is and the other devoted to identifying where an object is (Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982). On this view, the occipitotemporal cortex is mainly the province of the former system, known as the ventral stream because of the idea that visual information flows, in some sense, from occipital cortex forward and ventrally toward the temporal cortex (see Figure 1). The other system, known as the dorsal stream because information is held to flow from occipital to parietal cortex, seems to play a role in either spatial perception, as noted above, or alternatively, in...
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