Finally, the researchers were able to demonstrate that a hierarchy of neurons exists in the visual cortex. They showed that lower-level cells are tasked to detect simple visual patterns, such as line segments. The output from these neurons is used in subsequent layers of neurons to construct more and more complex patterns, forming the objects and people we see and interact with. Indeed, modern neuroscience confirms that the structure of the visual cortex is hierarchically organized to perform increasingly complex inferences using the output of previous layers, as illustrated:
The preceding diagram means that recognizing a friend involves detecting the line segments making up their face (V1), using those segments to build shapes and edges (V2), using those shapes and edges to form complex shapes such as eyes and noses (V3), and then leveraging...
