Distributed, layered and reliable computing nets to represent neuronal receptive fields

Receptive fields of retinal and other sensory neurons show a large variety of spatiotemporal linear and non linear types of responses to local stimuli. In visual neurons, these responses present either asymmetric sensitive zones or center-surround organization. In most cases, the nature of the responses suggests the existence of a kind of distributed computation prior to the integration by the final cell which is evidently supported by the anatomy. We describe a new kind of discrete and continuous filters to model the kind of computations taking place in the receptive fields of retinal cells. To show their performance in the analysis of different non-trivial neuron-like structures, we use a computer tool specifically programmed by the authors to that effect. This tool is also extended to study the effect of lesions on the whole performance of our model nets.