Jonathan Victor (Department of Neurology and Neuroscience, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, USA)
"Understanding the Computations in Primary Visual Cortex: Does Tweaking the Standard Model Suffice?" / Monday, October 17, 2011, 17:15 h
| When |
Oct 17, 2011
from 05:15 PM to 06:45 PM |
|---|---|
| Where | Lecture Hall, Hansastr. 9a |
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The Bernstein Center Freiburg Bernstein Seminar |  |
Jonathan D. Victor Department of Neurology and Neuroscience Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, USA Understanding the Computations in Primary Visual Cortex: Does Tweaking the Standard Model Suffice? | |
Monday, October 17, 2011 17:15 h | Lecture Hall (ground floor) Bernstein Center Freiburg Hansastraße 9A 79104 Freiburg |
Abstract: A central problem in systems neuroscience is to understand the nature of computations by neural networks. The visual system is an excellent model for addressing this question, and our knowledge of the retina illustrates the kind of success we can hope to achieve. Our understanding of cortical computations is at present much more limited. The standard model consists of a bank of feedforward filters and simple nonlinearities. However, there are substantial differences between the computations performed by real cortical neurons and computations of models based on a feedforward cascade. These differences are present not only for responses to complex real-world natural images, but, as we show, when visual cortex is probed with artificial stimuli with a relatively simple mathematical structure. The common denominator in these stimuli is the presence of high-order spatial correlations. These observations suggest that a strongly recurrent network is an appropriate basic framework for understanding cortical computations. | |
Host: Michael Bach | |
| The talk is open to the public. Guests are cordially invited! www.bcf.uni-freiburg.de | |