Abstract

Significance The vertical occipital fasciculus (VOF) is a major white-matter fascicle connecting dorsal and ventral visual cortex. Few vision scientists or cognitive neuroscientists are aware of the VOF's existence. The scarcity of papers on this important pathway stems from the contentious history surrounding its discovery by Wernicke in 1881. We review the conflict surrounding the classic, postmortem, VOF measurements, and we introduce modern, in vivo methods to precisely characterize the VOF's cortical terminations and unique tissue properties. The new VOF measurements provide insight into the communication between ventral stream regions involved in form perception and dorsal stream regions involved in eye movements and attention.