title: A model of non-linear interactions between cortical top-down and horizontal connections explains the attentional gating of collinear facilitation.
abstract: Past physiological and psychophysical experiments have shown that attention can modulate the effects of contextual information appearing outside the classical receptive field of a cortical neuron. Specifically, it has been suggested that attention, operating via cortical feedback connections, gates the effects of long-range horizontal connections underlying collinear facilitation in cortical area V1. This article proposes a novel mechanism, based on the computations performed within the dendrites of cortical pyramidal cells, that can account for these observations. Furthermore, it is shown that the top-down gating signal into V1 can result from a process of biased competition occurring in extrastriate cortex. A model based on these two assumptions is used to replicate the results of physiological and psychophysical experiments on collinear facilitation and attentional modulation.
authors.affiliation: Division of Engineering, King's College London, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. kris@corinet.org
authors.forename: Kris
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: De Meyer
authors.forename: Michael W
authors.initials: MW
authors.lastname: Spratling
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003712:Dendrites / Q000502:physiology; D030141:Feedback, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology; D011601:Psychophysics; D017966:Pyramidal Cells / Q000502:physiology*; D014795:Visual Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*