How Close Are We to Understanding V1?

Olshausen, Bruno A.; Field, David

doi:10.1162/0899766054026639

Cited by 392 publications

(282 citation statements)

References 113 publications

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“…Although at present we cannot disentangle the contribution from cortical feedback and lateral interaction, we believe that the fact that such information is transmitted at all from stimulated to nonstimulated regions highlights the ubiquitous role that context might play in shaping the activity of all neurons in early vision. Indeed, several authors recently have pointed out that, to increase our understanding of V1 beyond the best current models, a deeper consideration of the role of context (both spatial and temporal) and of how such contextual information is transmitted is required (32)(33)(34).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonstimulated early visual areas carry information about surrounding context

Smith

Muckli

2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

185

215

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Even within the early sensory areas, the majority of the input to any given cortical neuron comes from other cortical neurons. To extend our knowledge of the contextual information that is transmitted by such lateral and feedback connections, we investigated how visually nonstimulated regions in primary visual cortex (V1) and visual area V2 are influenced by the surrounding context. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and pattern-classification methods to show that the cortical representation of a nonstimulated quarter-field carries information that can discriminate the surrounding visual context. We show further that the activity patterns in these regions are significantly related to those observed with feed-forward stimulation and that these effects are driven primarily by V1. These results thus demonstrate that visual context strongly influences early visual areas even in the absence of differential feed-forward thalamic stimulation.linear classifier | natural visual scenes | cortical feedback | lateral interaction I t is well known that the majority of input that arrives to a specific neuron in the early visual system comes from other cortical neurons (either local or long-range connections). Such connections provide one way for prior knowledge and context to modulate the responses of neurons in early vision. However, studies that investigate the role of such mechanisms within natural vision are relatively rare. In the present experiments we devised a paradigm in which we analyzed the influence of surrounding context on visually nonstimulated parts of primary visual cortex (V1) and visual area V2. We set out to investigate whether blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI) activity in nonstimulated early visual regions carries information about a surrounding visual context. Our goal was to test the hypothesis that lateral and feedback connections modulate and possibly prime regions of visual cortex by transmitting relevant contextual information.If this hypothesis is true, we would expect such mechanisms to work most productively when participants are presented with natural visual stimuli, because these stimuli contain a multitude of rich contextual associations across space and time (1). Therefore we presented participants with natural visual scenes in all the experiments reported here. Support for the above hypothesis is provided by recent demonstrations illustrating that V1 receives feedback even in regions that extend beyond the bottom-up stimulated area. For instance, the size of the activated region in retinotopic cortex corresponds to perceived size, not absolute size, in the context of a size illusion (2); moreover, the subjectively perceived apparent-motion illusion activates nonstimulated V1 on the motion trace (3), and object classification triggers discriminable activity at nonstimulated foveal representations (4). Other work has shown that feature-based attention spreads to nonstimulated regions of V2-V4 (5). Therefore contextual influences can extend beyond the r...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonstimulated early visual areas carry information about surrounding context

Smith

Muckli

2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

185

215

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“…What is interesting about this feedback is that it is between functional areas, is adaptive, and often changes as a function of task. It is therefore clear that feedback is a key component of visual analysis, but what is its compu-tational role (Olshausen & Field, 2005) and at what stage does it occur in order to produce observed behavior?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling learned categorical perception in human vision

Casey

Sowden

2012

Neural Networks

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“…Focusing on the why of the physiology, it excludes descriptive models concerning what and how, e.g., models of the center-surround receptive fields of the retinal ganglion cells, or mechanistic models of how orientation tuning in V1 develops. Useful reviews of early vision with related or different emphases and opinions can be found in, e.g., Atick (1992), Meister andBerry 1999, Simoncelli andOlshausen (2001), Lennie (2003), Lee (2003), and Olshausen and Field (2005 Figure 1: Process flow diagram illustrating two bottom-up strategies proposed for early vision to reduce data rate through information bottlenecks -(1) data compression with minimum information loss, and, (2) creating a saliency map to enable lossy selection of information.…”

Section: Introduction and Scopementioning

confidence: 99%

Theoretical understanding of the early visual processes by data compression and data selection

2006

Network: Computation in Neural Systems

134

123

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Abstract:Early vision is best understood in terms of two key information bottlenecks along the visual pathway -the optic nerve and, more severely, attention. Two effective strategies for sampling and representing visual inputs in the light of the bottlenecks are (1) data compression with minimum information loss and (2) data deletion. This paper reviews two lines of theoretical work which understand processes in retina and primary visual cortex (V1) in this framework. The first is an efficient coding principle which argues that early visual processes compress input into a more efficient form to transmit as much information as possible through channels of limited capacity. It can explain the properties of visual sampling and the nature of the receptive fields of retina and V1. It has also been argued to reveal the independent causes of the inputs. The second theoretical tack is the hypothesis that neural activities in V1 represent the bottom up saliencies of visual inputs, such that information can be selected for, or discarded from, detailed or attentive processing. This theory links V1 physiology with pre-attentive visual selection behavior. By making experimentally testable predictions, the potentials and limitations of both sets of theories can be explored.

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How Close Are We to Understanding V1?

Cited by 392 publications

References 113 publications

Nonstimulated early visual areas carry information about surrounding context

Nonstimulated early visual areas carry information about surrounding context

Modeling learned categorical perception in human vision

Theoretical understanding of the early visual processes by data compression and data selection

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