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Estimation of the orientation of short lines with a realistic population of cortical neurons

Estimation of the orientation of short lines with a realistic population of cortical neurons by Kirill Nikolai Shokhirev Doctor of Philosophy in Physics University of California, Berkeley Professor Donald A. Glaser, Chair The inhomogeneous distribution of the receptive fields of cortical neurons influences the cortical representation of the orientation of short lines seen in visual images. A model of the response of populations of neurons in the human primary visual cortex is constructed by combining realistic response properties of individual neurons and cortical maps of orientation and location preferences. The encoding error characterizes the difference between a visual stimulus and its cortical representation, and is calculated using Fisher information, as the square root of the variance of a statistically efficient estimator. The error of encoding orientation varies with the location and orientation of the short line stimulus as modulated by the underlying orientation preference map. The average encoding error depends weakly on the structure of the orientation preference map and is smaller than the human error of estimating orientation. From this comparison I conclude that the actual mechanism of orientation perception does not make efficient use of all the information available in the neuronal responses and that the decoding of visual information from neuronal responses limits psychophysical performance.