David Marr ’ s Vision : floreat computational neuroscience

This is a reprint of David Marr's 1982 book. A foreword placing the book in its historical context is added by Shimon Ullman, and an afterword by Tomaso Poggio is added on some of the themes in the book. David Marr was one of the originators of computational neuroscience, and the useful re-publication of this book enables us to assess how this field is developing, and to put David Marr's contributions into perspective. David Marr (1945–80) obtained a First Class degree in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in 1966; and was sufficiently interested in how the brain works to attend the Part II undergraduate courses in physiology and psychology of the Natural Sciences Tripos. (David was not experienced in practical classes, and happened to be paired with Barbara Rolls, the first female PhD student in physiology at Cambridge, who also sat in on the practical classes and provided expertise partly as a result of her training with Alan Epstein at the University of Pennsylvania.) One of the lecturers in physiology was Giles Brindley, who was interested in vision (as were many of the other members of the Department, including Giles Brindley published a paper on how different classes of syn-apses might show plasticity and contribute to learning in neural networks (Brindley, 1969). These lectures and this work stimulated David's thinking about synaptic modification and its role in systems in the brain that learn. This led to three seminal papers: One important property of David Marr's approach at this time was the move to take into account the quantitative network architecture of the brain system being modelled—the hippocampus, cerebellum and neocortex (Marr, 1969, 1970, 1971)—to produce a quantitative theory. This has proven to be very important in subsequent computational neuroscience approaches to memory, vision, attention and decision making However, neuroscience was insufficiently advanced in the 1970s for David Marr to put his theories to empirical test. Nonetheless, he did try—working for example with John Eccles (Eccles et al., 1967) to test the prediction that the cerebellar parallel fibre to Purkinje cell synapses would modify associatively with the inferior olive/climbing fibre input to the Purkinje cell. They were not able to confirm this prediction, perhaps in part because the climbing fibre input was stimulated at much higher rates than these fibres are now known to fire naturally (in the range of 0–10 spikes/s). But this fundamental tenet and prediction of the …