Orientation selectivity is a remarkable feature of the neurons located in the primary visual cortex. Provided that the visual neurons acquire orientation selectivity through activity-dependent Hebbian learning, the development process could be understood as a kind of symmetry breaking phenomenon in the view of physics. The key mechanisms of the development process are examined here in a neural system. Found is that there are at least two different mechanisms which lead to the development of orientation selectivity through breaking the radial symmetry in receptive fields. The first, a simultaneous symmetry breaking mechanism, bases on the competition between neighboring neurons, and the second, a spontaneous one, bases on the nonlinearity in interactions. It turns out that only the second mechanism leads to the formation of a columnar pattern which characteristics accord with those observed in an animal experiment.
A Bayes-Markov Neuromorphic Model of Cortical Orientation Selectivity: A Computational Re-implementation and Quantitative Simulation Study
Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）；Islamic Azad University（伊斯兰阿扎德大学）；Pasargad Institute for Advanced Innovative Solutions (PIAIS)（帕萨加德高级创新解决方案研究所）
A rotation-equivariant convolutional neural network model of primary visual cortex
Center for Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, BCM（贝勒医学院神经科学与人工智能中心）；Baylor College of Medicine（贝勒医学院）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of Tübingen（图宾根大学伯恩斯坦计算神经科学中心）；Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics（马克斯·普朗克生物控制论研究所）；Rice University（莱斯大学）
