Receptive Fields, Binocular Interaction and Functional Architecture in the Cat's Visual Cortex

Receptive Fields, Binocular Interaction and Functional Architecture in the Cat’s Visual Cortex

Hubel, David, and Torsten Wiesel
The Journal of physiology 160, no. 1 (1962): 106

“The receptive field of a cell in the visual system may be defined as the portion of retina within which a stimulus can influence the firing of that cell. It can also be described as the area of the visual field over which one can influence the cell’s activity. In the cat’s retina, there are two principal kinds of ganglion cell: those with ‘on’-centre receptive fields and those with ‘off’-centre fields (Kuffler, 1953). The lateral geniculate body also shows this same retinal dichotomy, containing cells of these two types with no others having been identified to date (Hubel & Wiesel, 1961). By contrast, the visual cortex contains a wide range of functionally distinct cell types. Yet for all this variety, one family is notably absent: the simple concentric ‘on’-centre or ‘off’-centre organization. Except for the afferent fibres arriving from the lateral geniculate body, we have not encountered cortical units with such concentric-type fields.”

— Hubel & Wiesel