Spontaneous emergence of fast attractor dynamics in a model of developing primary visual cortex

Recent evidence suggests that neurons in primary sensory cortex arrange into competitive groups, representing stimuli by their joint activity rather than as independent feature analysers. A possible explanation for these results is that sensory cortex implements attractor dynamics, although this proposal remains controversial. Here we report that fast attractor dynamics emerge naturally in a computational model of a patch of primary visual cortex endowed with realistic plasticity (at both feedforward and lateral synapses) and mutual inhibition. When exposed to natural images (but not random pixels), the model spontaneously arranges into competitive groups of reciprocally connected, similarly tuned neurons, while developing realistic, orientation-selective receptive fields. Importantly, the same groups are observed in both stimulus-evoked and spontaneous (stimulus-absent) activity. The resulting network is inhibition-stabilized and exhibits fast, non-persistent attractor dynamics. Our results suggest that realistic plasticity, mutual inhibition and natural stimuli are jointly necessary and sufficient to generate attractor dynamics in primary sensory cortex.