| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Receptive fields are probably the most prominent and ubiquitous computational mechanism employed by biological information processing systems. We report an attempt to understand the representational capabilities of the kind of receptive fields found in mammalian vision motivated by the assumption that the successive stages of processing remap the retinal representation space in a manner that makes objectively similar stimuli (e.g., different views of the same 3D object) closer to each other, and dissimilar stimuli farther apart. We present theoretical analysis and computational experiments that compare the similarity between stimuli as they are represented at the successive levels of the processing hierarchy, from the retina to the nonlinear cortical units. Our results indicate that population-based codes do convey information that seems lost in the activities of the individual receptive fields, and that at the higher levels of the hierarchy objects may be represented in a form that is more useful for visual recognition. This finding may, therefore, explain the success of previous empirical approaches to object recognition that employed representation by localized receptive fields.