Models Of The Visual Cortex

Some of the best vision scientists in the world in their respective fields have contributed to chapters in this book. They have expertise in a wide variety of fields, including bioengineering, basic and clinical visual science, medicine, neurophysiology, optometry, and psychology. Their combined efforts have resulted in a high quality book that covers modeling and quantitative analysis of optical, neurosensory, oculomotor, perceptual and clinical systems. It includes only those techniques and models that have such fundamentally strong physiological, control system, and perceptual bases that they will serve as foundations for models and analysis techniques in the future. The book is aimed first towards seniors and beginning graduate students in biomedical engineering, neurophysiology, optometry, and psychology, who will gain a broad understanding of quantitative analysis of the visual system. In addition, it has sufficient depth in each area to be useful as an updated reference and tutorial for graduate and post-doctoral students, as well as general vision scientists.

This volume, with chapters by leading researchers in the field, is devoted to early vision and attention, that is, to the first stages of visual information processing. This state-of-the-art look at biological neural networks spans the many subfields, such as computational and experimental neuroscience; anatomy and physiology; visual information processing and scene segmentation; perception at illusory contours; control of visual attention; and paradigms for computing with spiking neurons.

A comprehensive and stimulating study which presents the views of 71 leading theorists on the underlying mechanisms and functions of the primary visual cortex.

Dr. Charles Legéndy’s Circuits in the Brain: A Model of Shape Processing in the Primary Visual Cortex is published at a time marked by unprecedented advances in experimental brain research which are, however, not matched by similar advances in theoretical insight. For this reason, the timing is ideal for the appearance of Dr. Legéndy’s book, which undertakes to derive certain global features of the brain directly from the neurons. Circuits in the Brain, with its “relational firing” model of shape processing, includes a step-by-step development of a set of multi-neuronal networks for transmitting visual relations, using a strategy believed to be equally applicable to many aspects of brain function other than vision. The book contains a number of testable predictions at the neuronal level, some believed to be accessible to the techniques which have recently become available. With its novel approach and concrete references to anatomy and physiology, the monograph promises to open up entirely new avenues of brain research, and will be particularly useful to graduate students, academics, and researchers studying neuroscience and neurobiology. In addition, since Dr. Legéndy’s book succeeds in achieving a clean logical presentation without mathematics, and uses a bare minimum of technical terminology, it may also be enjoyed by non-scientists intrigued by the intellectual challenge of the elegant devices applied inside our brain. The book is uniquely self-contained; with more than 120 annotated illustrations it goes into full detail in describing all functional and theoretical concepts on which it builds.

For more than 30 years, the visual cortex has been the source of new theories and ideas about how the brain processes information. The visual cortex is easily accessible through a variety of recording and imagining techniques and allows mapping of high level behavior relatively directly to neural mechanisms. Understanding the computations in the visual cortex is therefore an important step toward a general theory of computational brain theory.