Primary Visual Cortex Represents the Difference Between Past and Present

By Nora Nortmann, Sascha Rekauzke, Selim Onat, Peter König, Dirk Jancke. 2013

33 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The visual system is confronted with rapidly changing stimuli in everyday life. It is not well understood how information in such a stream of input is updated within the brain. We performed voltage-sensitive dye imaging across the primary visual cortex (V1) to capture responses to sequences of natural scene contours. We presented vertically and horizontally filtered natural images, and their superpositions, at 10 or 33 Hz. At low frequency, the encoding was found to represent not the currently presented images, but differences in orientation between consecutive images. This was in sharp contrast to more rapid sequences for which we found an ongoing representation of current input, consistent with earlier studies. Our finding that for slower image sequences, V1 does no longer report actual features but represents their relative difference in time counteracts the view that the first cortical processing stage must always transfer complete information. Instead, we show its capacities for change detection with a new emphasis on the role of automatic computation evolving in the 100-ms range, inevitably affecting information transmission further downstream.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science & Psychology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. David R Ha
2. J. Urgen Schmidhuber
3. Faustino J. Gomez
4. Jan Koutník
5. Olof Mogren

In Neuroscience

1. J. Urgen Schmidhuber
2. David R Ha

In Cognitive Science & Psychology

1. David R Ha
2. J. Urgen Schmidhuber
3. Jeff Clune
4. Trevor Darrell
5. Karl J. Friston
6. Pulkit Agrawal

Citations in the corpus

• Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Evolution (2018, background): “For example, what we perceive at any given moment seems to be governed by our predictions of the future [52, 59].”
• World Models (2018, background): “Evidence also suggests that what we perceive at any given moment is governed by our brains prediction of the future based on our internal model (Nortmann et al., 2015; Gerrit et al., 2013).”
• V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning (2025, unknown): “…sensory inputs to represent and predict future states (Craik, 1967; Rao and Ballard, 1999), and they further posit that this world model shapes our perception at any given moment, playing a crucial role in informing our understanding of reality (Friston, 2010; Clark, 2013; Nortmann et al., 2015).”