title: How does the cerebral cortex work? Learning, attention, and grouping by the laminar circuits of visual cortex.
abstract: The organization of neocortex into layers is one of its most salient anatomical features. These layers include circuits that form functional columns in cortical maps. A major unsolved problem concerns how bottom-up, top-down, and horizontal interactions are organized within cortical layers to generate adaptive behaviors. This article models how these interactions help visual cortex to realize: (i) the binding process whereby cortex groups distributed data into coherent object representations; (ii) the attentional process whereby cortex selectively processes important events; and (iii) the developmental and learning processes whereby cortex shapes its circuits to match environmental constraints. New computational ideas about feedback systems suggest how neocortex develops and learns in a stable way, and why top-down attention requires converging bottom-up inputs to fully activate cortical cells, whereas perceptual groupings do not.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems and Center for Adaptive Systems, Boston University, MA 02215, USA.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Grossberg
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D019579:Neocortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D015398:Signal Transduction; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*