ABSTRACT
David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel will always be known for characterising the responses of single cells in the primary visual cortex, although they made many other groundbreaking discoveries concerning cortical architecture, along with highlighting the importance of experience in the visual system's development. Hubel and Wiesel identified the presence of "orientation columns". In brief, when they lowered a recording electrode perpendicularly into the visual cortex, they found that the receptive fields of the cells all had the same preferred line orientations. One of their most important was to show that the visual cortex consists of cube-like units, which they called 'hypercoloumns'. Hubel and Wiesel undertook an important work on the development of the visual cortex – and in particular the age at which the structure of the visual cortex was modifiable through experience. Another seminal contribution of Hubel and Wiesel was to demonstrate that the nature of visual processing is hierarchical.
