Local Neocortical Processing: a Time for Recognition

The experimentally observed rapid processing of information in visual cortex has led to the suggestion that it may be primarily carried out through feedforward, as opposed to lateral, connections. A novel analytical approach allows studying the dynamics of networks of integrate-and-fire model neurons, reciprocally connected through synaptically activated conductances. This yields the attractor states of the network and the full spectrum of time constants of the transients. The results indicate that, unexpectedly, a substantial amount of lateral processing may contribute, already very early on, to the information contained in single-cell responses.