PSYC 311 Lecture 17: Lecture 17 - Visual Agnosia

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 311
• Professor: Michalakis Petrides

Document Summary

Psyc311: lecture 17: visual agnosia, and the distinction between. Last class we discussed the two visual streams. A pathway is a connection that starts from a certain part of the brain and goes to another part of the brain. But the two visual pathways involve a series of steps neurons don"t start at a and go directly to b they must pass through some intermediate structures v1 v2 v3 and so on. Therefore, it is more correct to refer to them as streams - a series of pathways. When mortimer mishkin removed the inferotemporal cortex bilaterally, the patients failed at the visual discrimination task (requiring the association of object characteristics to a reward). However, they were perfectly fine at the landmark discrimination task. They continued to research and discovered a series of pathways starting from v1, that eventually diverge to form the ventral stream (occipitotemporal) and dorsal stream (occipitoparietal). This was a perfect example of a double dissociation.