We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
MiS Preprint
15/2001
Nonlinear analysis of spatio-temporal receptive fields: III. RF-reconstruction from mean-field approximations
Thomas Wennekers
Abstract
Nonlinear neural field models describe spatio-temporal cortical activation patterns by one or several layers of locally interconnected neurons. Impulse response functions in such models relate to dynamic receptive fields in the considered sensory domain. I recently presented a new method to calculate approximate amplitudes and tuning widths of such functions and demonstrated that the amplitude reponses can often already be obtained from a low-dimensional set of "meanfield-type" ordinary differential equations. In the present work I show how approximations of the full spatio-temporal response functions can be reconstructed from this meanfield approximation. The reconstruction method is applied to the dynamics of orientation tuning in V1 neurons (Ringach et al., Nature 387: 281-284, 1997) and it is argued that these data are consistent with feedback as well as feedforward models.
