Why is Hubel and Wiesel's Description of the Classical Receptive Field Inadequate for an Understanding of Visual Perception?

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Hubel and Wiesel’s research surrounding area V1 of the primary visual cortex provided one of the first descriptions of the receptive fields in mammals. By flashing various lines along the receptive field, Hubel and Wiesel were able to classify cortical neurons into two distinct groups; simple and complex (Hubel & Wiesel, 1963). The use of manually mapping the receptive fields with simple dots, lines and edges meant that they not only discovered orientation tuning in single neurons, but also described the columnar organisation of ocular dominance and orientation preferences in the cerebral cortex (Ringach, 2004). Although Hubel and Wiesel’s findings were an extreme advance in our understanding of the visual cortex (Wurtz, 2009), it became apparent that there were cells in the visual system that responded to stimuli far more complicated than orientated lines meaning that the cells in area V1 were much more modifiable than Hubel and Wiesel had suggested. In this essay, Hubel and Wiesel’s classic receptive field shall be discussed along with reasons as to why it can no longer offer us a satisfactory explanation into visual perception. First to be discussed are the specific types of cells which were defined in Hubel and Wiesel’s classic experiment into the striate cortex.
Hubel and Wiesel defined the classic receptive field as a restricted region of the visual cortex. If a specific stimulus fell into this area, this may drive the cell to evoke action potential responses (Zipser, Lamme & Schiller, 1996). By shining orientated slits of light into the cat’s eye, they were able to discover that each cell had its own specific stimulus requirements (Barlow, 1982). Different cells differed from each other in many ways; some preferred a spe...

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