Mr.

McNickle David Wu #32

1. Describe the location of the primary visual cortex and give another name for it. There is a visual cortex for each hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere visual cortex receives signals from the right visual field and the right visual cortex from the left visual field. Another name for the visual cortex is the occipital lobe.

2. Why did Hubel and Wiesel win a Nobel prize? Hubel and Wiesel have disclosed one of the most well-guarded secrets of the brain: the way by which its cells decode the message which the brain receives from the eyes. They also discovered the plasticity of the brain cortex. They have achieved by tapping the signals from the nerve cells in the various cell layers of the brain cortex. They realized that the cells are arranged in columns, and the analysis takes place in a strictly ordered sequence from one nerve cell to another and every nerve cell is responsible for one particular detail in the picture pattern. They demonstrated that the visual cortex has feature detector neurons that receive this information and respond to a scenes specific features to particular edges, lines, and angles and movements. 3. A relationship was discovered between the pattern of light and dark on the retina and the spatial arrangement of activated neurons in the primary visual cortex. Describe that relationship. The relationship discovered between the pattern of light and dark on the retina and the spatial arrangement of activated neurons in the primary visual cortex depicts that when eyes are given stimulus, the retinal cells are so responsive that the pressure triggers the optic nerve to fire neurons to the visual cortex encoding the pressure as light.