A new angle on the role of feedfoward inputs in the generation of orientation selectivity in primary visual cortex.

摘要

Fifty years ago, in this journal, Hubel & Wiesel (1962) published what has become, arguably, one of the most influential articles in systems neuro-science history. Inspired by a systematic comparison of receptive field (RF) structure in thalamus (lateral geniculate nucleus, LGN) and primary visual cortex (V1), they described how V1 neurons could become selective to the orientation of visual contours, a critical first step towards object recognition. Hubel and Wiesel's model considers that simple cells and complex cells, the two main RF classes they originally described in V1, correspond to two successive stages in cortical processing. In the first stage, simple cells could emerge in layer 4 from the convergence of thalamic inputs with RFs arranged along a row in visual space. The spatial structure of the simple RF would thus represent the most parsimonious approach to build orientation detectors directly from LGN cells with circular RFs (Fig. 1A).