Retinotopy

Retinotopy is the concept that certain areas of the visual cortex are organized in a way that adjacent points in the visual field (that fall on adjacent points on the retina) are processed by neurons in adjacent parts of that cortical area. As a direct consequence, the receptive fields of neighboring neurons are next to each other (or even overlap) in the visual field.

Those visual areas of the cortex that perform the first steps of processing the retinal image tend to be organized retinotopically, while this is less the case for higher processing steps such as the identification of faces.

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