Single Units and Sensation: 25 Years on

Abstract

In 1972 Horace Barlow (“Single units and sensation: a neuron doctrine for perceptual psychology?” Perception 1 371 – 394) proposed a set of dogmas to guide vision scientists in interpreting neurophysiological data. The 20th anniversary of ECVP is an appropriate occasion to ask if single-unit recordings have really helped us understand the visual system. The answer may be affirmative, but interpreting single-unit data has proved to be much more of a challenge than was anticipated in that early and optimistic era of single-unit recording. I review data from retinal and cortical experiments to illustrate this thesis, and ask if Barlow's dogmas are still relevant to current visual neuroscience.