Rüdiger Kupper, Andreas Knoblauch, Ursula Körner, Edgar Körner, Marc-Oliver Gewaltig, "Recollection and imagination in a functional model of visual cortex", Proceedings of the Computational Neuroscience Conference (CNS), pp. S10, 2007.

In Kupper et al., Neurocomp. 70(10-12), 1711-1716 (2007), we have presented a model of signal flow in functional cortical columns, across the six cortical layers and between several cortical areas. We showed how the columnar subsystems interact to predict and recognize stimuli in terms of locally stored knowledge. In this model, columnar communication integrated bottom-up signals with internally generated top-down signals to describe the stimulus consistently across all cortical areas. Here we extend this model to demonstrate that the same setup of intercommunicating columns can use the stored knowledge to integrate a pre-activation on the highest level with the bottom-up recognition process. Given only coarse or invariant top-down activation, the model can (i) guide and support the recognition of noisy or ambiguous stimuli, and (ii) recall known objects, at the highest level of detail, by creating specific neural activations across all cortical areas. The second process corresponds to recollection or mental imagery, the process in which the brain internally creates a percept without a physical stimulus.