Day 94 of 150 Pattern Difficulty 3/10
V1 builds vision from tiny oriented-edge detectors
Quick answer
V1 builds vision from tiny oriented-edge detectors. Today's question (Orientation columns in V1) asks about a finding from Hubel, D. H., & Wiesel, T. N. in 1962. The correct option is Oriented edges and bars within small receptive fields — full explanation, primary source, and glossary cross-links below.
Today's question
Hubel and Wiesel's electrode recordings from cat striate cortex (1962) revealed that primary visual neurons primarily respond to:
Reveal the answer and explanation
Correct: B — Oriented edges and bars within small receptive fields
Hubel and Wiesel (1962) discovered that simple cells in cat V1 respond best to bars and edges at specific orientations within a localized receptive field, while complex cells generalize across position. Mapping electrodes through cortex revealed an orderly arrangement: nearby cells share orientation preference, and preferences shift smoothly along the cortical surface (orientation columns). The work — which won the 1981 Nobel Prize — showed that early visual processing is built from oriented-edge detectors and motivated a generation of feature-hierarchy models, including the structure that today's convolutional networks recapitulate.
About the source
Hubel, D. H., & Wiesel, T. N. (1962). Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex. The Journal of Physiology, 160(1), 106–154.
Every Cognition Bible question cites a primary source — a paper, book chapter, or monograph that exists, that we can point to on Google Scholar, and whose finding the question accurately summarizes. No fabricated authority strings, no name-drops without paper-level grounding.
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