Journal article
bioRxiv, 2023
For the possibility of internships or lab visits, please contact Mario Senden via mario.senden@maastrichtuniversity.nl
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience
Maastricht University
Oxfordlaan 55
6229EV Maastricht
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience
Maastricht University
Oxfordlaan 55
6229EV Maastricht
APA
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da Costa, D., Kornemann, L., Goebel, R., & Senden, M. (2023). Unlocking the Secrets of the Primate Visual Cortex: A CNN-Based Approach Traces the Origins of Major Organizational Principles to Retinal Sampling. BioRxiv.
Chicago/Turabian
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Costa, Danny da, Lukas Kornemann, R. Goebel, and M. Senden. “Unlocking the Secrets of the Primate Visual Cortex: A CNN-Based Approach Traces the Origins of Major Organizational Principles to Retinal Sampling.” bioRxiv (2023).
MLA
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da Costa, Danny, et al. “Unlocking the Secrets of the Primate Visual Cortex: A CNN-Based Approach Traces the Origins of Major Organizational Principles to Retinal Sampling.” BioRxiv, 2023.
BibTeX Click to copy
@article{danny2023a,
title = {Unlocking the Secrets of the Primate Visual Cortex: A CNN-Based Approach Traces the Origins of Major Organizational Principles to Retinal Sampling},
year = {2023},
journal = {bioRxiv},
author = {da Costa, Danny and Kornemann, Lukas and Goebel, R. and Senden, M.}
}
Primate visual cortex exhibits key organizational principles: Cortical magnification, eccentricity-dependent receptive field size and spatial frequency tuning as well as radial bias. We provide compelling evidence that these principles arise from the interplay of the non-uniform distribution of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), and a quasi-uniform convergence rate from the retina to the cortex. We show that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) outfitted with a retinal sampling layer, which resamples images according to retinal ganglion cell density, develop these organizational principles. Surprisingly, our results indicate that radial bias is spatial-frequency dependent and only manifests for high spatial frequencies. For low spatial frequencies, the bias shifts towards orthogonal orientations. These findings introduce a novel hypothesis about the origin of radial bias. Quasi-uniform convergence limits the range of spatial frequencies (in retinal space) that can be resolved, while retinal sampling determines the spatial frequency content throughout the retina.