A temporal model of neural activity and VSD response in V1

Abstract

Mechanistic developmental models of the primary visual cortex (V1) in mammals have been able to replicate many of the large-scale spatial features of V1 neurons from experiments, such as their spatial receptive fields and the spatial organization into maps in V1 (reviewed in ref [1]). However, the models have previously been formulated at a very abstract level that does not account for the detailed, transient time course of neural responses. Conversely, there are a number of detailed, large-scale spiking models of the adult visual cortex, but these have not explained the development of feature preferences and feature maps, relying instead on prespecified patterns of connectivity. Here we present a new temporally and spatially calibrated model of cortical activity using ratebased units that could help unify these different types of explanation and levels of modelling. The model is called TCAL (Temporally CALibrated), and is a small variant on the GCAL model from the LISSOM family [1]. Compared to GCAL, the only change to the model mechanisms is to add hysteresis to the model LGN and V1 units. Hysteresis allows the damping of temporal responses to be controlled with one time-constant parameter per sheet. These two new parameters were set first for the LGN and then for V1to match results from electrophysiological recordings. Both onset and offset responses are matched against experimentally recorded peristimulus time histograms (PSTHs) for LGN [2] and cortical [3] neurons using the Invariant Response Description model. Despite the two orders of magnitude difference in time scales between GCAL and TCAL and