Receptive fields of single neurones in the cat's striate cortex

[2017-12-04 Mon 19:36:57] event: Papers We Love speaker: Ang Ming Liang

Figuring out how the cat’s visual cortex respond to simple images. Are there parts of the brain that respond to certain parts of the image?

Using a single dot of light

• Inhibitory neurons activate when the dot is in the middle.
• Excitatory neurons activate when the dot is at the sides.
• In other neurons, the pattern is inversed but the pattern exists for 45 neurons.

Using a lines and edges at different orientation

• hypothesis: the pulse of neurons indicate the direction of motion

Some neurons can respond to both left and right eye, most only for one eye

Found ocular dominance, left or right eye produce more neural signals

Key contribution: hierachy of representations in the brain for visual information

• retina cells detect prescence of light
• striate context cells can detect edges/motion
• hyper complex cells?

Also central to DNN for image recognition.

Notion of cortical column (group of neurons) from neuroscience, inspiration of capsule net.