Topic: cortical input layer 4

A fundamental property of neurons in the primary visual cortex is their preference for orientation of edges. It was shown that this orientation tuning is mostly invariant under contrast changes [1], a property that is not explained by a simple feed-forward scheme [2, 3]. We designed a synthetic hybrid neural circuit to study the emergence of orientation selectivity under different thalamo-cortical connections. To this end, a computational model of the retino-thalamic pathway was combined with an in-vitro model of cortical input layer 4. The latter was either a primary culture of cortical neur