the visual system – summary for Tuesday's session Psychology of Consciousness
A cortical homunculus is a physical representation of the human body, located within the brain. A cortical homunculus is a neurological "map" of the anatomical divisions of the body. There are two types of cortical homunculi: sensory and motor.
We focused on the visual system this week, noting some similarities between the visual system and the somatosensory system (which we covered last time). We examined how far our visual fields extend and found that the visual field for the left eye overlaps (but not completely) with the visual field for the right eye. We also learned about blind spots and made blind spot bookmarks, which we used to find our very own blind spots! We covered the visual pathway, and saw how damage to different areas leads to different types of visual field deficits. We also learned about the primary visual cortex (V1) and how V1 neurons (which we can think of as edge detectors) respond selectively to lines at specific orientations and some also respond selectively to lines moving in certain directions. We ended the session by watching some videos on experiments performed by Nobel laureates Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel in the 1950s.
Lily