Orientation Selectivity of Intracortical Inhibitory Cells in the Striate Visual Cortex: A Computational Theory and a Neural Circuitry

Abstract

Intracortical inhibitory cells are thought to play a major role in giving rise to orientation selectivity of simple and complex cells in the striate visual cortex. There is, on the other hand, an ample experimental evidence supporting that the intracortical inhibitory cells are orientation selective as well, thus, giving rise to the so-called bootstraping problem. This article shows how to solve the bootstraping problem in the striate visual cortex by introducing a computational theory that consists of a probabilistic model, a computational goal, a parallel algorithm to achieve the computational goal and a physiologically-plausible neural circuitry to implement the algorithm.