ABSTRACT
The occipital lobes are of fundamental importance in vision. All visual information enters the eye in an undiscriminated form, and is systematically processed so that different attributes, namely form, color, motion orientation and depth, are processed at distinct locations within functionally specialized regions in the visual cortex. These fragments of information are meaningfully integrated so that perceptual and cognitive representations of objects being viewed and their spatial relations to each other are constructed. Since the visual cortex lies within the occipital lobes, characteristic visual syndromes can be recognized as a result of occipital lesions which, if small enough, can cause blindness for a single class of vision. As a result of studies of patients with such focal cortical lesions and artificial lesion work in non-human primates, recent years have seen a great expansion of knowledge about the mechanisms by which the visual world is re-created in the brain.
