Concept
Hierarchy
Building complicated selectivity out of layers of simple selectivity — how the visual system turns spots of light into objects, and why where a signal enters a structure matters.
From the EE side
From the neuro side
Cortical cells respond to progressively more specific things the further you get from the retina, which is a claim about architecture rather than about any single cell. The same logic shows up inside a single neuron: a dendritic tree processes its inputs in stages before the soma ever sees them.
Nearby concepts
All topics under Hierarchy
- Receptive fields in visual cortex 1962 Cortical cells respond not to spots of light but to oriented edges at particular positions, and to progressively more abstract features further along the pathway.
- Cable theory 1959 Treating a dendrite as a leaky transmission line, borrowed from nineteenth-century telegraph engineering, which showed that dendrites compute rather than merely collect.