Zusammenfassung
Recoding sensory inputs to remove the input redundancy has been advocated as
a sensory preprocessing goal(Barlow 1961). An overwhelming source of
redundancy in visual inputs is the pair-wise image pixel correlation, and the
binocular correlation in particular. It is redundant to transmit the correlated
inputs from the two eyes independently to the cortex, and it has been proposed
that V1 cells de-correlate the binocular inputs to improve coding efficiency (Li
and Atick 1994). This means, the V1 cells recode or combine the retinal inputs
from the two eyes such that the cell outputs would be less correlated while
preserving input information. In particular, this leads to the following
consequences. (1) when the inputs from the two eyes are almost identical, such
as arising from horizontal bars which typically have near zero vertical
disparities, they are summed into binocular cells rather than redundantly and
separately coded by two monocular cells; (2) when the inputs from the two eyes
are more different, such as arising from bars oriented vertically, monocular or
ocularly unbalanced V1 cells will extract the difference between the two retinal
inputs and thus the stereo information; (3) when the retinal inputs are very weak,
e.g., when received by cells of smaller receptive fields or tuned to higher spatial
frequencies, they are summed into binocular cells in order to increase signal-tonoise.
This efficient code predicts that V1 cells tuned to horizontal orientation or
to higher spatial frequencies are more likely binocular than cells preferring other
orientations or spatial frequencies. To test these predictions, we examined the
data obtained by optical imaging (Hubener et al 1997) and electrophysiological
recordings (Anzai et al 1995) of the cat V1. By presenting visual stimulus of
different orientations and spatial frequencies through different eyes, the
preferred orientations, spatial frequencies, and ocular dominance were obtained
for single cells, or the local cortical areas of the optical images. In the optical
images from four cats, we examined the proportion of image pixels that are
more binocular among all the pixels tuned to particular orientation or spatial
frequency and confirmed both predictions. In the electrophysiological data from
136 V1 cells, we obtained distributions of ocular balance indices for cells tuned
to different ranges of orientations. We confirmed the predicted association
between horizontal orientation preference and binocularity. Our experimental
results confirmed the theoretical predictions, thus supporting the hypothesis of
efficient stereo coding as one of V1ís the role.
