A model of non-linear interactions between cortical top-down and horizontal connections explains the attentional gating of collinear facilitation

作者：De Meyer Kris^*; Spratling Michael W

来源：Vision Research, 2009, 49(5): 553-568.

DOI：10.1016/j.visres.2008.12.017

• Contrast detection
• Contour integration
• Lateral interactions
• Attention
• Perceptual grouping
• Cortex
• Neural network
• Dendrites

Past physiological and psychophysical experiments have shown that attention can modulate the effects of contextual information appearing outside the classical receptive field of a cortical neuron. Specifically, it has been suggested that attention, operating via cortical feedback connections, gates the effects of long-range horizontal connections underlying collinear facilitation in cortical area V1. This article proposes a novel mechanism, based on the computations performed within the dendrites of cortical pyramidal cells, that can account for these observations. Furthermore, it is shown that the top-down gating signal into V1 can result from a process of biased competition occurring in extrastriate cortex. A model based on these two assumptions is used to replicate the results of physiological and psychophysical experiments on collinear facilitation and attentional modulation.

• 出版日期2009-3-30