Overview of visual system structure and function

The fundamental role of the visual system is to analyze properties such as form, color and motion in the environment, facilitating the generation of behaviors conducive to survival. A (happy) outcome of these computations is that humans are endowed with conscious visual perception. Despite the complexity of processing in the visual system, we experience a single, unified and continuous percept. This review describes the general anatomy and physiology of the primate visual system, emphasizing four organizational principles and processing strategies that ultimately inform perception and behavior: information processing is functionally segregated; information is encoded in a multiplexed manner; information is hierarchically processed, dependent on feedback and feedforward connectivity; vision is an active sense, with perception and eye movements tightly integrated.