PSY 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Visual Cortex, Retina, Feature Extraction

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 1101
• Professor: Kenneth Campbell

Document Summary

In vision, we might experience many different colours, shapes and forms. From this we need to form and integrated whole to arrive at a perception of our visual input. Perception involves an exceedingly complex interaction of many different brain regions. Some of these are specialized for the extraction of specific features of the stimulus. To detect the flight of a bird, we first must detect an object (the bird) against the background. In order to make the decision that the object is a bird and it is moving requires the extraction of additional features. The bird will probably appear as a distant object on the retina (it will be small). We do not typically mistake a flying bird for a flying airplane. Birds are typically closer to the eye than airplanes. The size of the image of a bird on the retina and that of an airplane may not be all that different.