A Statistical Neural Field Approach to Orientation Selectivity

We apply the recently proposed statistical neural field approach [4,2] for modeling orientation selectivity in the primary visual cortex. Firstly, we demonstrate that the neural field approach is a powerful tool for modeling neural structures with specific lateral connections. Secondly, we test in a biologically more plausible way our hypothesis [1] that orientation bias and tuning in macaque striate cortex can be generated by the same lateral interactions. The spiking neural model shows that (i) contrast invariant tuning emerges, and (ii) the tuning dynamics of the membrane potential and the firing rate are in accordance with observations which until now seemed to be contradictory [3,5,7,6]. Key words: Orientation selectivity; Tuning dynamics; Recurrent connections; Statistical neural field model; 1 The statistical model Following [9,4] we describe the population activity of neurons as well as the propagation of spikes in terms of probability density functions (p.d.f.). For a neuron o..