possible listing

[Stephen Grossberg]

The following preprint on the subject of how the visual cortex is
organized to give rise to visual percepts has been accepted for
publication in Spatial Vision and is currently in press.

The paper is available from my home page:

http://cns-web.bu.edu/Profiles/Grossberg/

Paper copies are available through the mail.  Contact: amos at cns.bu.edu
and request by title:

Grossberg, S. (1998).
How does the cerebral cortex work? Learning, attention, and grouping
by the laminar circuits of visual cortex.  Spatial Vision, in press.

Abstract:

The organization of neocortex into layers is one of its most salient
anatomical features. These layers include circuits that form
functional columns in cortical maps. A major unsolved problem concerns
how bottom-up, top-down, and horizontal interactions are organized
within cortical layers to generate adaptive behaviors. This article
models how these interactions help visual cortex to realize: (1) the
binding process whereby cortex groups distributed data into coherent
object representations; (2) the attentional process whereby cortex
selectively processes important events; and (3) the developmental and
learning processes whereby cortex shapes its circuits to match
environmental constraints. New computational ideas about feedback
systems suggest how neocortex develops and learns in a stable way, and
why top-down attention requires converging bottom-up inputs to fully
activate cortical cells, whereas perceptual groupings do not.

A related article applies these insights to the processing of Synthetic
Aperture Radar images. This article is in press in Neural Networks. It is:
Mingolla, E., Ross, W., and Grossberg, S. (1998).
A Neural Network for Enhancing Boundaries and Surfaces in Synthetic
Aperture Radar Images. Paper copies can be gotten by writing
amos at cns.bu.edu.