What spatial and temporal processing takes place in the eye? the brain?
Subjectively, we experience many different qualitative aspects of vision, for example, form, color, motion, depth, etc. This information is all input into the visual system through the photoreceptors in the retina. Therefore the retina has to process the information to preserve all these different aspects of the visual stimulus. The term multiplexing is often used to describe the way the early visual system simultaneously sends this varied information to the brain. Specialized pathways are determined very early in visual processing. The second layer of retinal cells already has specialized neurons that process form by creating center-surround receptive fields. Different types of temporal response are seen in cells with either sustained or transient responses in the next layer of processing. Two streams of visual processing have been identified at the optic nerve level.
