Intracellular measurements of spatial integration and the MAX operation in complex cells of the cat primary visual cortex.

We have examined the spatial integration properties of complex cells to determine whether some of their responses can be described by a maximum operation (MAX)-like computation, as suggested by Riesenhuber and Poggio's model of object recognition. Membrane potential was recorded from anesthetized cats while optimally oriented bars were presented, either alone or in pairs, in different parts of the cells' receptive field. In most cells, the membrane potential response to two bars presented simultaneously could not be predicted by the sum of the responses to individual bars. In many cells, however, the responses closely approximated a MAX-like model. That is, the response of the cell to two bars was similar to the larger of the two individual responses ("soft-MAX"). The degree of nonlinear summation varied from cell to cell and varied within single cells from one stimulus configuration to another but on average fit most closely to the MAX model. The firing response of the cells was also well predicted by the MAX-like model. The MAX-like behavior was independent of the distance between the bars (orthogonal to the preferred orientation), independent of the relative amplitude of the responses, and slightly less pronounced at low levels of contrast. This MAX-like behavior of a subset of complex cells may play an important role in invariant object recognition in clutter.

[1]  D. Hubel,et al.  Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex , 1962, The Journal of physiology.

[2]  B. Dreher Hypercomplex cells in the cat's striate cortex. , 1972, Investigative ophthalmology.

[3]  C. Gilbert Laminar differences in receptive field properties of cells in cat primary visual cortex , 1977, The Journal of physiology.

[4]  D. Rose Responses of single units in cat visual cortex to moving bars of light as a function of bar length , 1977, The Journal of physiology.

[5]  P. O. Bishop,et al.  Hypercomplex and simple/complex cell classifications in cat striate cortex. , 1978, Journal of neurophysiology.

[6]  J. Movshon,et al.  Receptive field organization of complex cells in the cat's striate cortex. , 1978, The Journal of physiology.

[7]  E H Adelson,et al.  Spatiotemporal energy models for the perception of motion. , 1985, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics and image science.

[8]  Klein,et al.  Nonlinear directionally selective subunits in complex cells of cat striate cortex. , 1987, Journal of neurophysiology.

[9]  L. Palmer,et al.  The two-dimensional spatial structure of nonlinear subunits in the receptive fields of complex cells , 1990, Vision Research.

[10]  D. Ferster,et al.  EPSP-IPSP interactions in cat visual cortex studied with in vivo whole- cell patch recording , 1992, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[11]  D. Heeger Normalization of cell responses in cat striate cortex , 1992, Visual Neuroscience.

[12]  M. Carandini,et al.  Summation and division by neurons in primate visual cortex. , 1994, Science.

[13]  J. Movshon,et al.  Linearity and Normalization in Simple Cells of the Macaque Primary Visual Cortex , 1997, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[14]  N. Spruston,et al.  Action potential initiation and backpropagation in neurons of the mammalian CNS , 1997, Trends in Neurosciences.

[15]  D G Pelli,et al.  The VideoToolbox software for visual psychophysics: transforming numbers into movies. , 1997, Spatial vision.

[16]  J. Alonso,et al.  Functional connectivity between simple cells and complex cells in cat striate cortex , 1998, Nature Neuroscience.

[17]  Y. Frégnac,et al.  Visual input evokes transient and strong shunting inhibition in visual cortical neurons , 1998, Nature.

[18]  T. Poggio,et al.  Are Cortical Models Really Bound by the “Binding Problem”? , 1999, Neuron.

[19]  R. Shapley,et al.  Contrast's effect on spatial summation by macaque V1 neurons , 1999, Nature Neuroscience.

[20]  T. Poggio,et al.  Hierarchical models of object recognition in cortex , 1999, Nature Neuroscience.

[21]  I. Ohzawa,et al.  Neural mechanisms for processing binocular information II. Complex cells. , 1999, Journal of neurophysiology.

[22]  I. Ohzawa,et al.  Neural mechanisms for processing binocular information I. Simple cells. , 1999, Journal of neurophysiology.

[23]  Shigeru Tanaka,et al.  Spatial pooling in the second-order spatial structure of cortical complex cells , 2000, Vision Research.

[24]  M. Carandini,et al.  Membrane Potential and Firing Rate in Cat Primary Visual Cortex , 2000, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[25]  J. Alonso,et al.  Construction of Complex Receptive Fields in Cat Primary Visual Cortex , 2001, Neuron.

[26]  D. Ferster,et al.  Membrane Potential and Conductance Changes Underlying Length Tuning of Cells in Cat Primary Visual Cortex , 2001, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[27]  C. Baker,et al.  Linear filtering and nonlinear interactions in direction-selective visual cortex neurons: A noise correlation analysis , 2001, Visual Neuroscience.

[28]  D. Ferster,et al.  Prediction of Orientation Selectivity from Receptive Field Architecture in Simple Cells of Cat Visual Cortex , 2001, Neuron.

[29]  Martin A. Giese,et al.  Biophysiologically Plausible Implementations of the Maximum Operation , 2002, Neural Computation.

[30]  M. Riesenhuber,et al.  A Detailed Look at Scale and Translation Invariance in a Hierarchical Neural Model of Visual Object Recognition , 2002 .

[31]  T. Gawne,et al.  Responses of primate visual cortical neurons to stimuli presented by flash, saccade, blink, and external darkening. , 2002, Journal of neurophysiology.

[32]  T. Gawne,et al.  Responses of primate visual cortical V4 neurons to simultaneously presented stimuli. , 2002, Journal of neurophysiology.

[33]  T. Sato,et al.  Interactions of visual stimuli in the receptive fields of inferior temporal neurons in awake macaques , 2004, Experimental Brain Research.

[34]  P. O. Bishop,et al.  Spatial summation of responses in receptive fields of single cells in cat striate cortex , 1978, Experimental Brain Research.