Topic: spatial attention

During perception the visual system integrates current sensory evidence with previously acquired knowledge of the visual world. Presumably this computation relies on internal recurrent interactions. We record populations of neurons from the primary visual cortex of cats and macaque monkeys and find evidence for adaptive internal responses to structured stimulation that change on both slow and fast timescales. In the first experiment, we present abstract images, only briefly, a protocol known to produce strong and persistent recurrent responses in the primary visual cortex. We show that repetit

The eyes send a continuous stream of about two million nerve fibers to the brain, but only a fraction of this information is stored as visual memories. This talk will detail three neurocomputational models that attempt an understanding how the visual system makes on-the-fly decisions about how to encode that information. First, the STST family of models (Bowman & Wyble 2007; Wyble, Potter, Bowman & Nieuwenstein 2011) proposes mechanisms for temporal segmentation of continuous input. The conclusion of this work is that the visual system has mechanisms for rapidly creating brief episodes of a

Detecting a specific object in a visual scene is a task that the human visual system performs every day. To perform this target-specific object detection, it is necessary to filter out all unwanted objects during the processing, so that only the specific object can be detected. For this purpose, attention-related mechanisms along the visual pathway have been proposed to allow focusing on the desired object. Beuth and Hamker (2015) [1], using a biologically inspired recurrent model simulating lower and higher layers of the visual cortex, the frontal eye field, and the prefrontal cortex, showed