Walsh & Hoyt: Other Cerebral Areas Contributing to Visual Perception

Many areas of the brain other than those listed in Table 1.6 contribute to the analysis of vision. Neurons in the SC are special in their ability to respond to stimuli from different sensory inputs. These multisensory neurons have overlapping receptive fields for input from, for instance, simultaneous visual and auditory input. The SC in the monkey contains cells in its superficial layers that fire in response to visual stimulation and may play a role in localization of targets in space. The SC contains fixation, burst, and build-up cells. Monkeys can quickly learn to make accurate saccades into a hemifield made "blind" by ablation of area V1, but lose the ability to do so if their SC is then destroyed. The SC projects to pulvinar, which projects to area MT and to all other visual cortical regions. Isolated SC lesions in humans do not cause lasting visual deficits.