Stimuli outside classical receptive fields exert significant influence over neural activities in primary visual cortex. We propose that contextual influences enable V1 to respond more strongly to conspicuous input areas, such as region boundaries, and smooth contours or small figures and targets against backgrounds, making them more salient forperceptual pop-out, thus serving pre-attentive segmentation. This is demonstrated in a biologically based model, which provides testable predictions on outcomes of physiological and psychophysical experiments. The behavior of the model can be related to other phenomena such as asymmetry in visual search.
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