Ventral Visual Pathway

Visual information arriving at the cortex is first processed in the occipital lobe. From there, two main pathways project. The dorsal pathway projects visual information into the parietal lobe, the ventral pathway projects visual information into the temporal lobe.

The ventral pathway is hypothesised to play the major role in object identification. The temporal lobe receives this visual input from the ventral pathway, and the object(s) in the visual scene are compared to stored representations in the object-memory system, also located in the temporal lobe. The ventral pathway is also hypothesised to be a 'perception' pathway, in that it computes spatial relations among components of objects, allowing for their identification.

References:

1. Milner, D. A., & Goodale, M. (1995). The visual brain in action. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
2. Mishkin, M., Ungerleider, L., & Macko, K. (1983). Object vision and spatial vision: Two cortical pathways. Trends in Neuroscience, 6, 414-417.