Visual Angle and The Visual Cortex
The brain's primary visual cortex (area V1 or Brodmann area 17) contains a spatially isomorphic representation of the retina (see retinotopy). Loosely speaking, it is a distorted "map" of the retina. Accordingly, the size of a given retinal image determines the extent of the neural activity pattern eventually generated in area V1 by the associated retinal activity pattern.
Murray, Boyaci, & Kersten (2006) recently used Functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI to show, convincingly, that an increase in a viewed target's visual angle, which increases, increases the extent of the corresponding neural activity pattern in area V1.
Their most important finding, however, relates to the perceived visual angle and to the visual angle illusion.
Read more about this topic: Visual Angle
Famous quotes containing the words visual and/or angle:
“Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“The inhabitants of earth behold commonly but the dark and shadowy under side of heaven’s pavement; it is only when seen at a favorable angle in the horizon, morning or evening, that some faint streaks of the rich lining of the clouds are revealed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)