Visual area V2

Visual area V2 is the second major area in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex. It receives strong feedforward connections from Primary visual cortex (V1) and sends strong connections to Visual area V4 and Visual area MT . It also sends strong feedback connections to the Primary visual cortex.

Anatomically, V2 is split into four quadrants, a dorsal and ventral representation in the left and the right hemispheres. Together these four regions provide a complete map of the visual world. Functionally, V2 has many properties in common with Primary visual cortex. Cells are tuned to simple properties such as orientation, spatial frequency, and color.

Recent research has shown that V2 cells are tuned to the orientation of illusory contours, shows a small amount of attentional modulation (more than V1, less than V4), are tuned for moderately complex patterns, and may be driven by multiple orientations at different subregions within a single receptive field.