Abstract
‘The physiology and anatomy of the visual system’ describes what we have learned from neurophysiology and anatomy over the past eighty years and what this tells us about the meaning of the circuits involved in visual information processing. It explains how psychologists and physiologists use the terms ‘mechanism’ and ‘process’. For physiologists, a mechanism is linked to the actions of individual neurons, neural pathways, and the ways in which the neurons are connected up. For psychologists, the term is typically used to describe the processes the neural circuits may carry out. The human retina is described with explanations of lateral inhibition, receptive fields, and feature detectors as well as the visual cortex and different visual pathways.
