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Abstract:
Abstract: Our visual apparatus has evolved to guide
behaviour. It may give us elaborate and vivid pictures in our
heads, but that is not ultimately what it is there for. So a useful
approach to understanding the way the visual brain works may be to
look at its outputs as well as at its inputs. We can distinguish
two broad ways in which vision serves action. These are (i) to
provide efficient and reliable guidance for a wide range of actions
that we need to perform all the time, and (ii) to store and access
visual knowledge for purposes of recognition, planning, and
response selection. There are various lines of evidence for the
notion that these two broad functions of vision are catered for by
two distinct visual systems within the brain. I shall concentrate
on the behavioural evidence derived from studying brain-damaged
individuals in the laboratory.
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