Topic: normalization index

The size of a neuron’s receptive field increases along the visual hierarchy. Neurons in higher-order visual areas integrate information through a canonical mechanism called normalization, where neurons respond sublinearly to multiple stimuli in the receptive field (Carandini & Heeger, 2012). Neurons in visual cortex exhibit highly heterogeneous degrees of normalization, which can be measured by normalization index, defined as the sum of a neuron’s firing rate to each one of two stimuli divided by its firing rate when both stimuli are presented. Interestingly, it has been demonstrated that