The success of reproduction, although gradually increasing over the years, many couples also had been left frustrated following repeated failed attempts. Implantation of the embryo, can only take place in a receptive uterus and inadequate uterine receptivity is responsible for approximately two-thirds of implantation failures. Endometrial receptivity can be reduced by morphological and/or molec...

Under stimulation of the receptive fields (RF) of neurons in the cat area 17 by flashing Y-like figures of different shape and orientation, the sensitivity to these figures was revealed in 72% of the studied cells, while 62% of units were sensitive to cross-like figures as well. Tuning to Y-like figures was typically selective to their shape and orientation, but in some cases it was invariant t...

We used gratings and shapes defined by relative motion to study selectivity for static kinetic boundaries in macaque V4 neurons. Kinetic gratings were generated by random pixels moving in opposite directions in the neighboring bars, either parallel to the orientation of the boundary (parallel kinetic grating) or perpendicular to the boundary (orthogonal kinetic grating). Neurons were also teste...

In a typical scene with many different objects, attentional mechanisms are needed to select relevant objects for visual processing and control over behavior. To test the role of area V4 in the selection of objects based on non-spatial features, we recorded from V4 neurons in the monkey, using a visual search paradigm. A cue stimulus was presented at the center of gaze, followed by a blank delay...

We model a two-eye visual environment composed of natural images and study its effect on single cell synaptic modification. In particular, we study the effect of binocular cortical misalignment on receptive field formation after eye opening. We show that binocular misalignment affects principal component analysis (PCA) and Bienenstock, Cooper, and Munro (BCM) learning in different ways. For the...

Competition-based models of visual attention propose that perceptual ambiguity is resolved through inhibition, which is stronger when objects share a greater number of neural receptive fields (RFs). According to this theory, the misallocation of attention to a salient distractor--that is, the capture of attention--can be indexed in RF-scaled interference costs. We used this pattern to investiga...

Neurons in sensory brain regions shape our perception of the surrounding environment through two parallel operations: decomposition and integration. For example, auditory neurons decompose sounds by separately encoding their frequency, temporal modulation, intensity, and spatial location. Neurons also integrate across these various features to support a unified perceptual gestalt of an auditory...

Internal mapping of the external environment is carried out using the receptive fields of topographic neurons in the brain, and in a normal barn owl the aural and visual subcortical maps are aligned from early experiences. However, instantaneous misalignment of the aural and visual stimuli has been observed to result in adaptive behavior, manifested by functional and anatomical changes of the a...

The perception of sensory stimuli by an animal requires several steps, commencing with the capture of stimulus energy by an antenna that, as the interface between the physical world and the nervous system, modifies the stimulus in ways that enhance the animal's perception. The mammalian external ear, for example, collects sound and spectrally alters it to increase sensitivity and improve the de...

Capturing nature's statistical structure in behavioral responses is at the core of the ability to function adaptively in the environment. Bayesian statistical inference describes how sensory and prior information can be combined optimally to guide behavior. An outstanding open question of how neural coding supports Bayesian inference includes how sensory cues are optimally integrated over time....