Functional asymmetry of local connections in V1 and its impact on orientation tuning

Classic models of primary visual cortex (V1) reproduce orientation selectivity with sufficiently high accuracy. However, they are unable to explain phenomena that are widely studied experimentally: a single cell carry additional information in response waveform and oscillations. Among the other effects not reproduced by the classic models are changes in the peak orientation during the response time course and shifts induced by inhibition blockage. We suppose that the main reason for such a failure is assumption that spatial distribution of short-range horizontal connections in V1 is symmetric. In the present study, we provide an experimental evidence that such symmetry is not the case in higher mammals. Based on this evidence we improved the classical model of V1 by replacing the symmetric spatial distribution to another one revealed from experiments. The improved model is able to reproduce orientation shifts and transmission of additional information. This means that the asymmetry shall take into consideration when simulating V1.