to a stimulus. All areas of the visual pathway except for the retina are able to be influenced by top-down processing. There is a traditional view that visual processing follows a feedforward system where there is a one-way process by which light is sent from the retina to higher cortical areas, however, there is increasing evidence that visual pathways operate bidirectionally, with both feedforward and feedback mechanisms in place that transmit information to and from lower and higher cortical areas. Various studies have demonstrated this idea that visual processing relies on both feedforward and feedback systems (Jensen et al., 2015; Layher et al., 2014; Lee, 2002). Various studies that recorded from early visual neurons in macaque monkeys found evidence that early visual neurons are sensitive to features both within their receptive fields and the global context of a scene. Two other monkey study used electrophysiology to find different frequencies that are associated with feedforward and feedback processing in monkeys (Orban, 2008; Schenden & Ganis, 2005). Studies with monkeys have also shown that neurons in higher level visual areas are selective to certain stimuli. One study that used single unit recordings in macaque monkeys found that neurons in middle temporal visual area, also known as area MT or V5, were highly selective for both direction and speed (Maunsell & Van Essen, 1983). Disorders of higher-level visual processing There are various disorders that are known the cause deficits in higher-level visual processing, including visual object agnosia, prosopagnosia, topographagnosia, alexia, achromatopsia, akinetopsia, Balint syndrome, and astereopsis. These deficits are caused by damage to brain structure implicated in either the ventral or dorsal visual stream (Barton 2011). Processing of face and place stimuli Past models of visual processing have distinguished certain areas of the brain by the specific stimuli that they are most responsive to; for example, the parahippocampal place area (PPA) has been shown to have heightened activation when presented with buildings and place scenes (Epstein & Kanwisher, 1998), whereas the fusiform face area (FFA) responds mostly strongly to faces and face-like stimuli (Kanwisher et al., 1997). Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA) The parahippocampal place area (PPA) is located in the posterior parahippocampal gyrus, which itself is contained in the medial temporal lobe with close proximity to the hippocampus. Its name comes from the increased neural response in the PPA when viewing places, like buildings, houses, and other structures, and when viewing environmental scenes,