Stimulus-induced oscillations and synchrony among neuronal populations in visual cortex are well established phenomena. Their functional role in cognition are, however, not well understood. Recent studies have suggested that neural synchrony may underlie perceptual grouping as stimulus-frequency relationships and stimulus-dependent lateral connectivity profiles can determine the success or failure of synchronization among neuronal groups encoding different stimulus elements. We suggest that the same mechanism accounts for collinear facilitation and suppression effects where the detectability of a target Gabor stimulus is improved or diminished by the presence of collinear flanking Gabor stimuli. We propose a model of oscillators which represent three neuronal populations in visual cortex with distinct receptive fields reflecting the target and two flankers, respectively, and whose connectivity is determined by the collinearity of the presented Gabor stimuli. Our model simulations confirm that neuronal synchrony can indeed explain known collinear facilitation and suppression effects for attended and unattended stimuli.

中文翻译：

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皮质同步是早期视觉皮层共线促进和抑制的机制

视觉皮层中神经元群之间的刺激引起的振荡和同步是公认的现象。然而，它们在认知中的功能作用尚不清楚。最近的研究表明，神经同步可能是感知分组的基础，因为刺激频率关系和刺激依赖的横向连接配置文件可以决定编码不同刺激元素的神经元组之间同步的成功或失败。我们建议相同的机制解释了共线促进和抑制效应，其中目标 Gabor 刺激的可检测性因共线侧翼 Gabor 刺激的存在而提高或减弱。我们提出了一个振荡器模型，它代表视觉皮层中的三个神经元群，具有分别反映目标和两个侧翼的不同感受野，其连通性由所呈现的 Gabor 刺激的共线性决定。我们的模型模拟证实，神经元同步确实可以解释已知的共线促进和对有人参与和无人参与的刺激的抑制作用。