ABSTRACT
This chapter considers many examples of the constructive nature of the seeing brain, from the perception of visual attributes, such as color and motion, up to the recognition of objects and faces. Light is converted into neural signals by the retina, and there are several routes by which this information is carried to the brain. The retina is the internal surface of the eyes that contains specialized photoreceptors that convert light into neural signals. One emerging view of visual processing in the brain beyond primary visual cortex is that different types of visual information get parsed into more specialized brain regions. Disorders of object recognition are referred to as visual agnosia, and these have been traditionally subdivided into apperceptive agnosia and associative agnosia, depending on whether the deficit occurs at stages involved in perceptual processing or stages involving stored visual memory representations.
