When:
2010-05-31 at 11:30
Where:
University Pierre&Marie Curie Paris VI, Building B, 5th floor, Room 501 (How to come)
Details:
TITLE
Understanding the computations in primary visual cortex: does tweaking the standard model suffice?
ABSTRACT
A central problem in systems neuroscience is to understand the nature of cortical computations, and how they relate to cortical structure. Primary visual cortex is an excellent model system for addressing these questions, since its inputs are readily controlled and its anatomy is well-understood. Most studies have suggested that neurons of primary visual cortex can be modeled as a bank of feedforward filters and simple nonlinearities. Here we present evidence of widespread and dramatic differences between the computations performed by real cortical neurons and computations of models based on a feedforward cascade. These differences suggest that a strongly recurrent network is an appropriate basic framework for understanding cortical computations.