Researched
Visual cortex cells
Hubel and Wiesel found in 1959 that cells in the visual cortex respond to oriented edges, building images step by step.
Open in the interactive tree →David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel recorded single neurons in the visual cortex of cats from 1959 and discovered cells that fire for a line at one particular angle; simple features combine into more complex ones in later layers (Nobel Prize 1981). The hierarchy they described inspired Fukushima's Neocognitron and the convolutional neural networks behind modern image recognition.