What is the other 85% of V1 doing?

This article will pose the following challenge: that despite four decades of research characterizing the response properties of V1 neurons, we still do not have a decent picture of how V1 really operates—i.e., how a population of its neurons represents natural scenes under realistic viewing conditions. We identify five problems with the current view that stem largely from biases in the design and execution of experiments, in addition to the contributions of non-linearities in the cortex that are not well understood. Our purpose is to open the window to new theories, a number of which we describe along with some proposals for testing them.

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