PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Charlie W. Zhao
AU  - Mark J. Daley
AU  - J. Andrew Pruszynski
TI  - Neural network models of the tactile system develop first-order units with spatially complex receptive fields
AID  - 10.1101/164954
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 164954
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/17/164954.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/17/164954.full
AB  - First-order tactile neurons have spatially complex receptive fields. Here we use machine learning tools to show that such complexity is normatively good, arising for a wide range of training sets and network architectures, and benefiting network performance on discrimination tasks especially in the presence of noise. We suggest that complex receptive fields reflect the role of first-order tactile neurons as the input elements of a compressed sensing scheme.