TiViPE Simulation of a Cortical Crossing Cell Model

Many cells in cat and monkey visual cortex (area V1 and area 17) respond to gratings and bar patterns of different orientation between center and surround [18]. It has been shown that these cells respond on average 3.3 times stronger to a crossing pattern than to a single bar [16]. In this paper a computational model for a group of neurons that respond solely to crossing patterns is proposed, and has been implemented in visual programming environment TiViPE [10]. Simulations show that the operator responds very accurately to crossing patterns that have an angular difference between 2 bars of 40 degrees or more, the operator responds appropriately to bar widths that are bound by 50 to 200 percent of the preferred bar width and is insensitive to non-uniform illumination conditions, which appear to be consistent with the experimental results.