Chapter 3 – Spatial Vision

Publisher Summary The topic of spatial vision concerns the fundamental mechanisms within the eye and the brain that analyze and represent the distribution of light across the visual field with the ultimate goal of understanding how these mechanisms contribute to object recognition and scene interpretation in general. A wealth of psychophysical and physiological research supports the view that stimulus selectivity plays a fundamental role in spatial vision. Psychophysical studies have provided evidence that the human visual system is selective along a number of stimulus dimensions including orientation, size, position, wavelength, speed of motion, direction of motion, and binocular disparity. These studies have shown that there are mechanisms selective to different regions along each of these stimulus dimensions. Similarly, neurophysiological and anatomical studies have demonstrated that neurons in the visual pathway are selective along a number of stimulus dimensions, and that this selectivity increases from the retina to the primary visual cortex. This chapter relies upon a wealth of psychophysical and physiological research to develop the topic of spatial vision with two themes in mind.