Loxley, Peter

Bettencourt, L M

Kenyon, G T

2011

Salient features instantly attract visual attention to their location and are crucial for object recognition. Experiments in ultra-fast visual perception have shown that object recognition can be surprisingly accurate given only ~20 ms of observation. Such short times exclude neural dynamics of top-down feedback and require fast mechanisms of low-level feature detection. We derive a neural model of the primary visual cortex with physiologically parameterized horizontal connections that reinforce salient features, and apply it to detect salient contours on ultra-fast time scales. Model performance qualitatively matches experimental results for human perception of contours, suggesting rapid neural mechanisms involving feedforward horizontal connections can be used to distinguish low-level objects.

Europhysics Letters, 93(6), p. 1-5

1286-4854

0295-5075

https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/20347

EDP Sciences

Ultra-fast detection of salient contours through horizontal connections in the primary visual cortex

Journal Article

Publication