EN
Numerous psychophysical, behavioural and neurological studies implicate the mammalian primary visual cortex as the ‘seat’ of visual perception. Seminal work of Hubel and Wiesel published mainly in the 60-ties of the previous century, lay down foundations for the feedforward model of receptive field properties of individual neurons in the primary visual cortices of mammals with frontally positioned eyes (e.g. domestic cats and primates). The feedforward model has been somewhat modified by the discovery (mainly in the 70-ties of the previous century) of the parallel information channels in the retino-thalamo-cortical pathway. To this day, the excitatory feedforward model remains the mainstay of our thinking about the mechanisms underlying the processing of information in the primary visual cortices. To a large extent, the excitatory feedforward hierarcho-parallel associational cortico-cortical connections are underpinning our understanding of properties of neurons in numerous ‘higher-order’ visual areas. Only in the last two decades or so a number of studies attempted to examine the role of numerically massive feedback pathways originating from the higher-order visual cortical areas in determining the responsiveness and at least some receptive field properties of neurons in the primary visual cortices.