I am not sure how to help you with this. I have been reading papers on the topic of vision for decades and have a pretty good idea of how much of this works. It is unfortunate that I can’t point to a single authoritative source for the things you are asking. Most of the papers I have been reading are written to a single point - often not the point I am researching - and the useful information is there as a side-effect.
I don’t think that you would find it satisfying to have me point you to a foot thick stack of paper to gather the same background that I am working from nor do I expect you to respect me as an authority. This exchange of points in “call and response” format quickly loses focus and become unreadable.
I will hit what I think are my main points here and you can take from them what you will.
The vision system is not the exclusive realm of the cortex. It integrates the posture system, the vestibular system, the early processing in the lizard brain (primarily though to the amygdala), and several layers from V1 forward to a host of centers in the cortex. On the path to these cortical destinations, the deep cortex layers pass axons down to the old brain and back again in loops that let the lizard brain take repeated samples of what the cortex is doing.
Vision is an active process that does not work in a single exposure like a photograph. The lizard brain forces the eye to layer multiple images one on another as the saccades force the fovea to look at what the old brain chooses to be interested in. In the cortex, I think of this ends up looking like a palimpsest; when we learn something we are learning what the parts layered on top of each other look like.
There are known built-in archetypes like faces, concave, convex, horizon lines, shapes of secondary sexual characteristics, and various animal shapes. These are low-resolution shapes that are the drivers for the sub-cortical structures to drive frontal eye fields to drive saccades for scanning. I have reason to believe that as the cortex become more capable some of this catalog of shapes is increased but I don’t have a single authority on that conjecture.
I am firmly convinced that we are born with our lizard brain mostly in control and this serves as the training guide to the cortex. In the “Three Visual Streams” paper I have seen the clearest defense for my intuition that for the most effective learning in a multi-map/layer system you need training to both push from the bottom and pull from the top. The lizard is at one end and the real world is on the other end. I am convinced that is why we have both feedforward and feedback paths throughout the brain.
In the beginning, the lizard brain drags the cortex through the motions. Some of these motions are learning to see, learning to move, leaning to imitate noises and through that eventually to speak. Through speaking we learn to think and reason. As the cortex learns the world the cortex eventually takes over. The cortex digests the world into a format the lizard brain can deal with and the lizard brain makes decisions that are then implemented through the forebrain. It is has been repeatedly demonstrated that we make decisions before we are aware that we have done so.
I call it my dumb boss/smart advisor theory.
You asked what can the lizard part of the brain see? If you think about this you will have to answer the basic question - what DOES a lizard see when it looks at a car? Even if it does not know anything about cars it sees something. A crocodile can chase prey over the shape of a car without knowing much about cars.
As long as we are here: I have posted my take on consciousness on this site - if you combine that with the global workspace theory you will have a pretty good idea where I am going with my take on an AGI. In a nutshell - the senses feed into the parietal lobe and the lizard brain feeds into the frontal lobe. There are multiple broad pathways with successive data processing on the way with autobiographical memory somewhere in the middle, and some rather direct connections between these two poles. If a something is sensed in the world that meets up with a lizard-generated need there is a global workspace ignition and the related plan in the frontal lobe is enhanced into action. This plan allows for nested actions and constant feedback on the state of an ongoing global plan. If you want to talk about this I can follow up on it in the “post if you have an AGI” thread.