Abstract
The sensory detectors of the visual system are built through mechanisms that depend on the visual experience of the individual animal, and through mechanisms that have evolved over the eons of evolution but do not depend on the experience of the individual animal. Given the abilities of modern deeplearning systems to learn from examples, one might imagine that a large fraction of the visual system might be built purely by learning through example, but a majority of the receptive field properties are initially formed through molecular cues and activitydependent plasticity that depends only on spontaneous activity. Even some features that require that the individual animal have visual experience, such as the development of direction selectivity in carnivores and primates, are largely seeded at the onset of visual experience, and properties like direction preference angle are not very malleable. This chapter focuses on receptive field properties except for binocular responses, which are the subject of Chapter 51 in this volume.