Visual area V2

See:Visual cortex for overview of complete visual area of the brain

Visual area V2 is the second major area in the visual cortex, and first region within the visual association area. It receives strong feedforward connections from V1 and sends strong connections to V3, V4, and V5. It also sends strong feedback connections to the V1.

Anatomically, V2 is split into four quadrants, a dorsal and ventral representation in the left and the right hemispheres. Together these four regions provide a complete map of the visual world. Functionally, V2 has many properties in common with V1. Cells are tuned to simple properties such as orientation, spatial frequency, and color. The responses of many V2 neurons are also modulated by more complex properties, such as the orientation of illusory contours and whether the stimulus is part of the figure or the ground (Qiu and von der Heydt, 2005).

Recent research has shown that V2 cells show a small amount of attentional modulation (more than V1, less than V4), are tuned for moderately complex patterns, and may be driven by multiple orientations at different subregions within a single receptive field.

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