The normalization model
is an influential model of responses of
neurons
A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous tissue in all animals except sponges and placozoa. ...
in
primary visual cortex
The visual cortex of the brain is the area of the cerebral cortex that processes visual information. It is located in the occipital lobe. Sensory input originating from the eyes travels through the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and ...
.
David Heeger
David J. Heeger (born 1961) is an American neuroscientist, psychologist, computer scientist, data scientist, and entrepreneur. He is a professor at New York University, Chief Scientific Officer oStatespace Labs and Chief Scientific Officer and c ...
developed the model in the early 1990s,
and later refined it together with
Matteo Carandini and
J. Anthony Movshon
Joseph Anthony Movshon (born December 10, 1950 in New York City) is an American neuroscientist. He has made contributions to the understanding of the brain mechanisms that represent the form and motion of objects, and the way these mechanisms co ...
.
The model involves a divisive stage. In the numerator is the output of the classical
receptive field
The receptive field, or sensory space, is a delimited medium where some physiological stimuli can evoke a sensory neuronal response in specific organisms.
Complexity of the receptive field ranges from the unidimensional chemical structure of odo ...
. In the denominator, a constant plus a measure of local stimulus
contrast. Although the normalization model was initially developed to explain responses in the primary visual cortex, normalization is now thought to operate throughout the visual system, and in many other sensory modalities and brain regions, including the representation of odors in the olfactory bulb,
[ ] the modulatory effects of visual attention, the encoding of value, and the integration of multisensory information. It has also been observed at subthreshold potentials in the hippocampus.
[ ] Its presence in such a diversity of neural systems in multiple species, from invertebrates to mammals, suggests that normalization serves as a canonical neural computation.
Divisive normalization reduces the redundancy in natural stimulus statistics and is sometimes viewed as an implementation of the
efficient coding principle. Formally, divisive normalization is an
information-maximizing code for stimuli following a
multivariate Pareto distribution.
References
Visual perception
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