Elsevier

Neuropsychologia

Volume 104, September 2017, Pages 92-101
Neuropsychologia

Review article
The active construction of the visual world

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.08.003Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • The neuroanatomy of active vision is reviewed.

  • Saccadic eye movements are controlled by the oculomotor brainstem system.

  • The brainstem system is influenced by the basal ganglia and cortical networks.

  • Hemineglect can result from deficits in networks that select saccadic targets.

  • Memory processes support the temporal continuity of visual experience.

Abstract

What we see is fundamentally dependent on where we look. Despite this seemingly obvious statement, many accounts of the neurobiology underpinning visual perception fail to consider the active nature of how we sample our sensory world. This review offers an overview of the neurobiology of visual perception, which begins with the control of saccadic eye movements. Starting from here, we can follow the anatomy backwards, to try to understand the functional architecture of neuronal networks that support the interrogation of a visual scene. Many of the principles encountered in this exercise are equally applicable to other perceptual modalities. For example, the somatosensory system, like the visual system, requires the sampling of data through mobile receptive epithelia. Analysis of a somatosensory scene depends on what is palpated, in much the same way that visual analysis relies on what is foveated. The discussion here is structured around the anatomical systems involved in active vision and visual scene construction, but will use these systems to introduce some general theoretical considerations. We will additionally highlight points of contact between the biology and the pathophysiology that has been proposed to cause a clinical disorder of scene construction – spatial hemineglect.

Keywords

Saccades
Attention
Scene construction
Bayesian
Salience
Memory
Hemineglect

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