Neural dynamics of image representation in the primary visual cortex

Horizontal connections in the primary visual cortex have been hypothesized to play a number of computational roles: association field for contour completion, surface interpolation, surround suppression, and saliency computation. Here, we argue that horizontal connections might also serve a critical role for computing the appropriate codes for image representation. That the early visual cortex or V1 explicitly represents the image we perceive has been a common assumption in computational theories of efficient coding (Olshausen and Field (1996)), yet such a framework for understanding the circuitry in V1 has not been seriously entertained in the neurophysiological community. In fact, a number of recent fMRI and neurophysiological studies cast doubt on the neural validity of such an isomorphic representation (Cornelissen et al., 2006: von der Heydt et al., 2003). In this study, we investigated, neurophysiologically, how V1 neurons respond to uniform color surfaces and show that spiking activities of neurons can be decomposed into three components: a bottom-up feedforward input, an articulation of color tuning and a contextual modulation signal that is inversely proportional to the distance away from the bounding contrast border. We demonstrate through computational simulations that the behaviors of a model for image representation are consistent with many aspects of our neural observations. We conclude that the hypothesis of isomorphic representation of images in V1 remains viable and this hypothesis suggests an additional new interpretation of the functional roles of horizontal connections in the primary visual cortex. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.