A sparse coding model of V1 produces surround suppression effects in response to natural scenes

For example, surround suppression is one such nonlinear response property in which visual stimuli extending beyond the classical receptive field (CRF) selectively diminish neural responses. This property has been studied through electrophysiology experiments with synthetic stimuli (e.g., gratings). Surprisingly, high level sparse coding models implemented in a biologically plausible dynamical system have been shown to produce surround suppression effects that match individual and population observed responses [3]. More recently, surround suppression has been investigated experimentally using natural stimuli, and these experiments have shown an increase in the sparsity of measured responses [1, 2]. Despite these findings, it remains unclear whether a functional sparse coding model is sufficient to produce the types of surround suppression observed with natural stimuli. In this abstract, we demonstrate that the surround suppression effects recently observed with natural stimuli are also emergent properties of a sparse coding model (Figure 1).