Feed-forward inhibition in the visual thalamus

Based on recently available anatomical and physiological data, we propose a specific pattern of connectivity between relay and local interneuron cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus of the cat that can serve a more complex role in visual information processing than simply sharpen the receptive fields of relay cells. We treat a thalamic network composed of biophysical models of relay and interneuron cells receiving their input from partially overlapping retinal ON and OFF receptive field groups. A mechanism is proposed through which parallel processing and lateral inhibition in the forward direction can enhance spatial resolution at the thalamic level. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.