Reviews on the Visual Cortex: A Tribute to Hubel and Wiesel

Abstract

In this issue, we honor the legacy of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, whose pioneering work transformed the field of visual neuroscience. From their early characterization of neuronal response properties in primary visual cortex to their analysis of how experience impacts the development of the visual system, the work of Hubel and Wiesel revealed fundamental insights into cortical architecture, function, and plasticity. The collection of reviews in this issue was inspired by the 50 th anniversary of their landmark paper ''Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex,'' published in the Journal of Physiology in 1962 (Hubel and Wiesel, 1962). While the functional and organizational principles laid out in this paper certainly set the stage for a host of subsequent studies in the visual system, its reach has extended far beyond V1. It is a true ''classic'' in neuroscience and has served not only to guide work in the visual system but also to inspire any neuroscientist seeking to understand how the activity of individual neurons can give rise to perception and behavior.

Olfactory Critical Periods: How Odor Exposure Shapes the Developing Brain in Mice and Flies

“…CPP is induced by sensory stimuli; therefore, studies on critical periods are carried out using manipulations involving deprivation of, or over-exposure to, a sensory stimulus (Figure 1b). However, the core definition of the critical period rests heavily upon findings from sensory deprivation experiments that examined development and plasticity in the visual cortical circuits in kittens caused by monocular deprivation during the critical period [1][2][3]5]. They showed long-term functional changes in circuit organization and response properties in the cortex without major alterations in the peripheral circuits [4,5,83].…”

“…In the early postnatal life of an organism, there exists a specific time window when neuronal circuits show heightened levels of experiencedependent plasticity. This time of heightened neuronal plasticity is called the critical period and was first defined by the Nobel prize-winning work of Hubel and Wiesel in 1962 in the context of the development of cortical receptive fields of binocular vision [1][2][3][4][5]. Since then, critical periods have been discovered in multiple sensory modalities across species [6][7][8], including the visual, auditory, somatosensory, and olfactory cortices of mice [9][10][11][12] as well as the visual and sensorimotor circuits [13,14] of the fruit fly larvae and in the olfactory system of adult flies [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

Brain serotonergic fibers suggest anomalous diffusion-based dropout in artificial neural networks

“…However, each of the two fields has stimulated novel insights in the other. For example, the fundamental architecture of modern CNNs has deep roots in the visual neuroscience of the early 1960s and, in particular, in the notion of a hierarchical system of “receptive fields” ( Hubel and Wiesel, 1962 ; LeMasurier and Van Wart, 2012 ). On the other hand, recent advances in CNNs have convincingly demonstrated that complex neuroanatomical circuits with many specialized regions ( Sporns, 2010 ) or large-scale oscillations ( He et al, 2010 ) are not necessary for reliable detection and segmentation of objects in complex visual scenes or for human speech recognition ( Alzubaidi et al, 2021 ).…”