The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 86 No. 4 October 2001, pp. 1803-1815
Copyright ©2001 by the American Physiological Society

Local Correlation-Based Circuitry Can Account for Responses to Multi-Grating Stimuli in a Model of Cat V1

 ¹Graduate Group in Biophysics,  ²Departments of Physiology and Otolaryngology,  ³Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, and  ⁴W. M. Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143-0444

Lauritzen, T. Z., A. E. Krukowski, and K. D. Miller. Local Correlation-Based Circuitry Can Account for Responses to Multi-Grating Stimuli in a Model of Cat V1. J. Neurophysiol. 86: 1803-1815, 2001. In cortical simple cells of cat striate cortex, the response to a visual stimulus of the preferred orientation is partially suppressed by simultaneous presentation of a stimulus at the orthogonal orientation, an effect known as "cross-orientation inhibition." It has been argued that this is due to the presence of inhibitory connections between cells tuned for different orientations, but intracellular studies suggest that simple cells receive inhibitory input primarily from cells with similar orientation tuning. Furthermore, response suppression can be elicited by a variety of nonpreferred stimuli at all orientations. Here we study a model circuit that was presented previously to address many aspects of simple cell orientation tuning, which is based on local intracortical connectivity between cells of similar orientation tuning. We show that this model circuit can account for many aspects of cross-orientation inhibition and, more generally, of response suppression by nonpreferred stimuli and of other nonlinear properties of responses to stimulation with multiple gratings.