Center-surround interactions in a network model of layer 4Cα of primary visual cortex

Context integration is an ubiquitious principle in cortical processing underlying many perceptual and cognitive functions. Several neuropsychiatric disorders have been associated with an impairment of integration of context information, particularly schizophrenia. One way to investigate the mechanisms underlying context processing and its impairments, is to look at context integration in the well-understood visual system. Center-surround interactions (CSI), i.e. the mutual influencing of stimuli presented in the center and in the surround of the visual or receptive field, respectively, are well established, both in animal neurophysiology and human psychophysical and neuroimaging studies