Features and Objects in the Visual System

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The visual system is divided into a ventral stream specialized for object recognition and a dorsal stream specialized for motion processing and visuomotor guidance such as grasping objects. Because of this functional separation, there are many models of object representation in the ventral stream and many models of motion processing in the dorsal stream, but research has been mostly devoid of investigations as to the nature or existence of object representations in the dorsal stream. Based on the difference in functionality, the two streams would use these objects differently and therefore represent them differently too. That is, the ventral stream would be processing features relevant for object recognition, including shape, color, texture, etc. While the dorsal stream processes features relevant for action, such as spatial location, motion, 3d shape for grasping, etc. Thus, it becomes very important to correctly integrate or ‘bind’ the relevant features into each stream. Both streams process features, and these feature-selective neurons need to be connected or integrated into a distributed network to form a representation of the object. Feature integration, aka the Binding Problem, is a long outstanding problem in neuroscience.