Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 9 (NIPS 1996)
Alexander Dimitrov, Jack Cowan
In this paper we propose a model for the lateral connectivity of orientation-selective cells in the visual cortex based on information(cid:173) theoretic considerations. We study the properties of the input sig(cid:173) nal to the visual cortex and find new statistical structures which have not been processed in the retino-geniculate pathway. Applying the idea that the system optimizes the representation of incoming signals, we derive the lateral connectivity that will achieve this for a set of local orientation-selective patches, as well as the complete spatial structure of a layer of such patches. We compare the results with various physiological measurements.