BA 17 - primary visual

In the volumetric brain

The Territory

Structure. Brodmann area 17: striate cortex along the calcarine sulcus — the geniculostriate terminus with its line-of-Gennari stria, a strict retinotopic map occupying ~1.5–2 cm of medial occipital wall per hemisphere.

Function. The first cortical image: orientation, ocular dominance and spatial-frequency columns decompose the retinal scene for every downstream stream; its destruction gives contralateral homonymous hemianopia (macular sparing with pole-sparing infarcts).

The Levers — graded instruments & the levers to come

Behaviour · Action · Thought — the tagged profile

The Network — what fires with this region

Papers on disk — 216 full texts

The Evidence — Neurosynth studies (859)

The Evidence — NeuroQuery studies (790)

The Exploration Guide

*Occipital lobe · Mai atlas of record · 859 studies · 162 papers on disk*

This is where seeing begins — the striate cortex along the calcarine sulcus, the geniculostriate terminus, recognizable in cross-section by the line of Gennari that gives it its name. Two centimetres of medial occipital wall hold a strict retinotopic map of the entire visual field.

The Territory

Brodmann area 17: striate cortex along the calcarine sulcus — the geniculostriate terminus with its line-of-Gennari stria, a strict retinotopic map occupying ~1.5–2 cm of medial occipital wall per hemisphere.

*— {'source': 'Gazzaniga, Ivry & Mangun', 'work': 'Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, 4th ed., W. W. Norton', 'kind': 'textbook', 'locator': 'ch. 5, Sensation and Perception'}*

What It Does

The first cortical image: orientation, ocular dominance and spatial-frequency columns decompose the retinal scene for every downstream stream; its destruction gives contralateral homonymous hemianopia (macular sparing with pole-sparing infarcts).

The functional record is stark in its simplicity and consequence: orientation columns, ocular-dominance columns and spatial-frequency channels decompose the retinal scene for every stream downstream — and destruction of this patch produces contralateral homonymous hemianopia, macular sparing when the occipital pole's territory survives. The decoded profile here is dominated by method vocabulary — visual, V1, occipital — because V1 appears in nearly every imaging paper as the calibration anchor of the field. The graded matrix agrees with the textbooks: checkerboard-reversal and contrast-detection are highly-credible stimulators, motion-discrimination a standard assessor.

*— {'source': 'Gazzaniga, Ivry & Mangun', 'work': 'Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, 4th ed., W. W. Norton', 'kind': 'textbook', 'locator': 'ch. 5, Sensation and Perception'}*

The Network

Its coactivation partners run from the anatomy outward: the calcarine sulcus it wraps (635), then intraparietal sulcus (401), thalamus (366) and anterior cingulate (364) — the retinotopic core talking to the attention systems that task it.

Co-activation partners of record: Calcarine sulcus:635, Intraparietal sulcus:401, Thalamus:366, Cingulate gyrus, anterior:364, Inferior frontal gyrus, opercular part:352, Inferior frontal sulcus:338, Postcentral sulcus:338, BA 6 - premotor/SMA:330.

When It Fails

Contralateral homonymous hemianopia is the lesion signature; the spared macula in pole-sparing lesions is the detail every neurology clerk memorizes. Nothing in the open record invents subtler syndromes — the honest story is the map and its loss.

The Evidence

• A role for the right anterior temporal lobe in taste quality recognition. (1997)
• A common network of functional areas for attention and eye movements. (1998) — 10.1016/S0896-6273(00)80593-0
• Signal-, set- and movement-related activity in the human brain: an event-re (1999) — 10.1093/cercor/9.1.35
• Attenuated frontal activation in schizophrenia may be task dependent. (1999) — 10.1016/S0920-9964(98)00141-8
• Electrophysiological studies of human face perception. I: Potentials genera (1999) — 10.1093/cercor/9.5.415
• Neural activity relating to generation and representation of galvanic skin (2000)

859 studies total touch this region in the Neurosynth corpus of record; the full literature lives beside this dossier.

The Levers

• checkerboard-reversal — stimulator · highly-credible
• contrast-detection — stimulator · highly-credible
• motion-discrimination — assessor · standard-scientific
• grating-adaptation — inhibitor · standard-scientific
• checkerboard-reversal — assessor · standard-scientific
• contrast-detection — assessor · standard-scientific

Candidate levers (Neurosynth-decoded terms — visual(method-other), occipital(anatomy-reference), eye(action-motor), tasks(method-other), schizophrenia(method-other), visual cortex(method-other), v1(method-other), networks(anatomy-reference) …) are the foundation for the thousands of instruments to come; they are ungraded by law.

Explore Further

Calcarine sulcus:635, Intraparietal sulcus:401, Thalamus:366, Cingulate gyrus, anterior:364 — each name is a dossier stop in this explorer.

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