Some Quantitative Remarks about the Retina, the Primary Visual Cortex, and Visual Perception in Humans

Psychophysics was founded in the middle of the 19th century as a scientific discipline with the goal to relate the mental processes to the physical world. In vision, on the basis of psychophysical experiments, many predictions were made about the physiological mechanisms underlying perception. Physiologists started to study vision independently without the necessity to find a psychophysical interpretation for their results and a lot of physiological as well as anatomical work on the retina and the visual parts of the central nervous system was carried out without direct reference to perception. At the same time an analogous development took place in psychophysics: perception became a subject to be studied in its own right. In this paper I would like to link visual perception and physiology as closely as possible.