Lindeberg Tony
Computational Brain Science Lab, Division of Computational Science and Technology, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44, Stockholm, Sweden.
J Comput Neurosci. 2025 Jun 20. doi: 10.1007/s10827-025-00907-4.
This paper presents the results of combining (i) theoretical analysis regarding connections between the orientation selectivity and the elongation of receptive fields for the affine Gaussian derivative model with (ii) biological measurements of orientation selectivity in the primary visual cortex to investigate if (iii) the receptive fields can be regarded as spanning a variability in the degree of elongation. From an in-depth theoretical analysis of idealized models for the receptive fields of simple and complex cells in the primary visual cortex, we established that the orientation selectivity becomes more narrow with increasing elongation of the receptive fields. Combined with previously established biological results, concerning broad vs. sharp orientation tuning of visual neurons in the primary visual cortex, as well as previous experimental results concerning distributions of the resultant of the orientation selectivity curves for simple and complex cells, we show that these results are consistent with the receptive fields spanning a variability over the degree of elongation of the receptive fields. We also show that our principled theoretical model for visual receptive fields leads to qualitatively similar types of deviations from a uniform histogram of the resultant descriptor of the orientation selectivity curves for simple cells, as can be observed in the results from biological experiments. To firmly investigate the validity of the underlying working hypothesis, we finally formulate a set of testable predictions for biological experiments, to characterize the predicted systematic variability in the elongation over the orientation maps in higher mammals, and its relations to the pinwheel structure.
（i）关于仿射高斯导数模型中方向选择性与感受野伸长之间联系的理论分析；（ii）初级视觉皮层中方向选择性的生物学测量；以研究（iii）感受野是否可被视为在伸长程度上存在变异性。通过对初级视觉皮层中简单细胞和复杂细胞感受野的理想化模型进行深入理论分析，我们确定随着感受野伸长增加，方向选择性会变得更窄。结合先前已确立的关于初级视觉皮层中视觉神经元宽与锐方向调谐的生物学结果，以及先前关于简单细胞和复杂细胞方向选择性曲线结果分布的实验结果，我们表明这些结果与感受野在感受野伸长程度上存在变异性是一致的。我们还表明，我们用于视觉感受野的原理性理论模型会导致与简单细胞方向选择性曲线结果描述符的均匀直方图在定性上类似的偏差类型，这在生物学实验结果中也能观察到。为了坚定地研究潜在工作假设的有效性，我们最终为生物学实验制定了一组可测试的预测，以表征高等哺乳动物方向图上伸长的预测系统变异性及其与风车结构的关系。
