Prof. Li Chaoyi and his colleagues He Zijiang, Pei Xing, Xu Xingzhen et al. with the Institute of Neuroscience under the CAS Shanghai Institutes of Biological Sciences are engrossed in studies in the brain's visual mechanism and have made important contributions to understanding the structure and functions of the classical and non-classical receptive fields (RFs). Their major contributions are: The RF of retinal ganglion cells and lateral geniculate neurons is traditionally known to consist of two concentric regions: a circular excitatory center and an annular inhibitory surround. Li and his team have demonstrated an extensive disinhibitory region outside the inhibitory surround, which may contribute to transmit area contrast and luminance gradients of visual images. Based on this observation, they proposed a new theoretical model suggesting the existence of a tripartite concentric organization for the RF. The new model has been used to explain the origin of image-evoked potentials induced by visual stimuli, and is applied to the fields of neuronal network and artificial intelligence. They also found an extensive integration field (IF) beyond the classical RF of cortical neurons and demonstrated different structures of the IF that might be adapted to the analysis of different visual texture patterns.
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