Separate visual pathways for perception and action

Abstract

Accumulating neuropsychological, electrophysiological and behavioural evidence suggests that the neural substrates of visual perception may be quite distinct from those underlying the visual control of actions. In other words, the set of object descriptions that permit identification and recognition may be computed independently of the set of descriptions that allow an observer to shape the hand appropriately to pick up an object. We propose that the ventral stream of projections from the striate cortex to the inferotemporal cortex plays the major role in the perceptual identification of objects, while the dorsal stream projecting from the striate cortex to the posterior parietal region mediates the required sensorimotor transformations for visually guided actions directed at such objects.