The role of early visual cortex in visual integration: a neural model of recurrent interaction

This paper presents a model on the potential functional roles of the early visual cortex in the primate visual system. Our hypothesis is that early visual areas, such as V1, are important for continual interaction among various higher order visual areas during visual processing. The interaction is mediated by recurrent connections between higher order visual areas and V1, manifested in the long-latency context-sensitive activities often observed in neurophysiological experiments, and is responsible for the re-integration of information analysed by the higher visual areas. Specifically, we considered the case of integrating 'what' and 'where' information from the ventral and dorsal streams. We found that such a cortical architecture provides simple solutions and fresh insights into the problems of attentional routing and visual search. The computational viability of this architecture was tested by simulating a large-scale neural dynamical network.