Abstract
Lateral intracortical interactions are believed to be responsible for the sharpening of the receptive field profiles of visual cortical cells. This study demonstrates a structurally imposed limitation of long range interactions on the frequently invoked cross orientation inhibition scheme: it leads to inhomogeneous input for different cell populations which is experimentally not observed. We propose a novel connection scheme called “circular inhibition“ which circumvents this problem. The scheme is analyzed by computer simulation of the early visual system of the cat, and by studying a simple analytically solvable model. Our model yields results consistent with the experimentally determined structure of the orientational hypercolumns in area 18 of the cat.
To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Chapter PDF
References
Albus, K. (1975a,b). A quantitative study of the projection area of the central and paracentral visual field in area 17 of the cat. I. the precision of the topography., II. The spatial organization of the orientation domain. Exp. Brain Res., 24: 159–202.
Batschelet, E. (1981) Circular statistics in biology, Academic Press, New York.
Braitenberg, V. (1984). Charting the visual cortex, in: Cerebral cortex, Vol 3., A. Peters and E.G. Jones (eds.), Plenum Press N.Y.
Dowling, J. E. (1987). The Retina: An Approachable Part of the Brain Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Durbin, R. and Mitchison, G.(1990). A dimension reducing framework for understanding cortical maps. Nature 343, 644–647.
Ferster, D. and Koch, C. (1987) Trends in the Neurosciences 10: 487–492.
Hata, Y., Tsumoto, T., Sato, H., Hagihara, K. and Tamura, H. (1988). Inhibition contributes to orientation selectivity in visual cortex of cat. Nature, 335: 815–817.
Hubel, D.H., and Wiesel, T.N. (1962). Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat’s visual cortex. J. Physiol. (Lond.) 160, 106–154.
Hubel, D.H., and Wiesel, T.N. (1963). Shape and arrangement of columns in cat’s striate cortex. J. Physiol. (Lond.), 165: 559–568.
Mead, C. (1988) Analog VLSI and Neural Systems Addison-Wesley, Reading MA.
Sillito, A.M. (1979) Inhibitory mechanisms influencing complex cell orientation selectivity and their modification at high resting discharge levels. J. Physiol 289: 33–53.
Sillito, A.M. (1984) Functional considerations of the operation of GABAergic inhibitory processes in the visual cortex, in: Cerebral cortex, Vol. 2., A. Peters and E.G. Jones (eds.), Plenum Press N.Y.
Swindale, N.V., Matsubara, J.A. and Cynader, M.S. (1987) Surface organization of orientation and direction selectivity in cat area 18. J. Neurosci 7, 1414–1427.
Thibos, L.N. and Levick, W.R. (1985) Orientation bias of brisk transient Y-cells of the cat retina for drifting and alternating grating. Exp. Brain Res 58, 1–10.
Wörgötter, F. and Eysel, U.Th. (1987) Quantitative determination of orientational and directional components in the response of visual cortical cells to moving stimuli.Biol. Cybern 57: 349–355.
Wörgötter, F. and Eysel, U.Th. (1990). Contributions of intracortical excitation and inhibition to orientation specificity in area 17 of the cat visual cortex, (submitted)
Wörgötter, F., Niebur, E. and Koch, C. (1990). Modeling visual cortex: Hidden anisotropies in an isotropic inhibitory connection scheme. In: Advanced Neural Computers, R. Eckmiller (ed.), Elsevier, Amsterdam. 87–95.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1990 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Niebur, E., Wörgötter, F. (1990). Sharpening of orientation selective receptive fields in the mammalian visual cortex by long-range interactions. In: Marburger, H. (eds) GWAI-90 14th German Workshop on Artificial Intelligence. Informatik-Fachberichte, vol 251. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-76071-6_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-76071-6_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-53132-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-76071-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive