Position Variance, Recurrence and Perceptual Learning
Zhaoping Li   Peter Dayan
NIPS 2000, to appear.
Abstract
Visual stimulus arrays are inevitably presented at different
positions on the retina in perceptual learning tasks, even tasks
that nominally require fixation. We show that inference in the face
of positional variance has a structurally different quality from
inference about fixed position stimuli, involving a particular,
quadratic, non-linearity rather than a purely linear discrimination.
We show the advantage this non-linearity has for discrimination, and
suggest it as a role for recurrent connections in area V1.
compressed postscript   pdf