Every illusion has a backstage crew. New research shows the brain’s own “puppet strings”—special neurons that quietly tug our perception—help us see edges and shapes that don’t actually exist. When ...

A scientific dispute spanning six decades about fundamental mechanisms of visual perception in mammals has now been settled.

Vision shapes behavior and, a new study by MIT neuroscientists finds, behavior and internal states shape vision. The research, published Nov. 25 in Neuron, finds in mice that via specific circuits, ...

In the brain, visual information is processed step by step along a hierarchy of regions. The primary visual cortex (V1) is the first cortical stage that receives visual input from the eyes and is ...

Researchers have settled a 60-year-old debate in neuroscience, proving that the visual cortex constructs complex images from ...

Perhaps our most defining characteristic as a species, the six-layered human cortex, hosts billions of neural connections that bestow Homo sapiens with higher-order thinking. But how does this ...