Figure 1.

Visual environment. To model the visual environment, we use 12 gray-scale images of size 256 × 256 pixels; the figure shows three sample images. A circle of diameter 13 pixels (white circle in left image) defines the visual field or retinal patch of a simulated neuron in V1. In each step of the simulation, we sample a small part of the environment by randomly shifting the position of the circle. The inputs from this region of the visual field are then preprocessed by the retinal machinery and serve as input to the cortical cell.