The Neural Control of Vision
H. The Function of the Midget and Parasol Channels in Vision

To learn more about what the roles are of the midget and parasol systems in vision, we had carried out a series of experiments in which we made small, selective lesions blocking either the parvocellular or the magnocellular geniculate. We then examined the visual capacities of animals by placing stimuli either into intact or lesioned portions of the visual field. The animals were tested on a broad range of visual tasks. To do so, we make a distinction between basic visual capacities and intermediate visual capacities. The former include color, brightness, motion, depth, texture, and shape perception. The latter, tested mostly with cortical lesions, include perceptual constancy, stimulus selection, object recognition, object comparison, transposition, and spatial location.