On how vision works - with Li Zhaoping - #5

We know a lot about of how neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) of mammals respond to visual stimuli.

But how does the vast information contained in the spiking of millions of neurons in V1 give rise to our visual percepts? 

The guest’s theory is that V1 acts as a “saliency detector” directing the gaze to the most important object in the visual scene. Then V1 in collaboration with higher visual areas determines what this object is in an iterative feedforward-feedback loop.