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Why Have Lateral Connections in the Visual Cortex?
Shimon
Edelman
Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science
The Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot 76100, Israel
edelman@wisdom.weizmann.ac.il
Abstract
Lateral connections are rapidly becoming an integral part in the
description of the functional architecture of many areas of the
mammalian visual cortex [21,23]. The
present paper surveys a number of possible computational reasons for
processing information laterally, in cases ranging from the
formation of orientation-selective receptive fields in the primary
visual area to the representation of three-dimensional objects in
the inferotemporal cortex. The invariable utility of lateral
connections in all these cases suggests that lateral information
processing should be considered not an anomaly, but a rule, and that
the answer to the question posed in the title should be ``Why not?''
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