Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Two-streams hypothesis
Summary
The two-streams hypothesis is a model of the neural processing of vision as well as hearing. The hypothesis, given its initial characterisation in a paper by David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale in 1992, argues that humans possess two distinct visual systems. Recently there seems to be evidence of two distinct auditory systems as well. As visual information exits the occipital lobe, and as sound leaves the phonological network, it follows two main pathways, or "streams". The ventral stream (also known as the "what pathway") leads to the temporal lobe, which is involved with object and visual identification and recognition. The dorsal stream (or, "where pathway") leads to the parietal lobe, which is involved with processing the object's spatial location relative to the viewer and with speech repetition.
Several researchers had proposed similar ideas previously. The authors themselves credit the inspiration of work on blindsight by Weiskrantz, and previous neuroscientific vision research. Schneider first proposed the existence of two visual systems for localisation and identification in 1969. Ingle described two independent visual systems in frogs in 1973. Ettlinger reviewed the existing neuropsychological evidence of a distinction in 1990. Moreover, Trevarthen had offered an account of two separate mechanisms of vision in monkeys back in 1968.
In 1982, Ungerleider and Mishkin distinguished the dorsal and ventral streams, as processing spatial and visual features respectively, from their lesion studies of monkeys – proposing the original where vs what distinction. Though this framework was superseded by that of Milner & Goodale, it remains influential.
One hugely influential source of information that has informed the model has been experimental work exploring the extant abilities of visual agnosic patient D.F. The first, and most influential report, came from Goodale and colleagues in 1991 and work is still being published on her two decades later. This has been the focus of some criticism of the model due to the perceived over-reliance on findings from a single case.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.