- Horace Barlow
Professor Horace Basil Barlow FRS (born
December 8 ,1921 ) is a British visual neuroscientist.In 1953 Barlow discovered that the
frog brain hasneurons which fire in response to specific visual stimuli. This was a precursor to the work ofHubel and Wiesel on visual receptive fields in the visual cortex. He has made a long study of visual inhibition, the process whereby a neuron firing in response to one group of retinal cells can inhibit the firing of another neuron; this allows perception of relative contrast.In 1961 Barlow wrote a seminal article where he asked what the computational aims of the visual system are. He concludedthat one of the main aims of visual processing is the reduction of redundancy. While the brightnesses of neighbouring pointsin images are usually very similar, the
Retina reduces this redundancy. His work thus was central to the field ofstatistics of natural scenes that relates the statistics of images of real world scenes to the properties of the nervous system.Barlow and his co-workers also did substantial work in the field of
factorial code s. The goal was to encode images withstatistically redundant components or pixels such that the code components arestatistically independent . Such codes are hard to find but highly useful for purposes of imageclassification etc. Barlow is the son of the civil servant SirAlan Barlow and LadyNora Darwin , and thus the great-grandson ofCharles Darwin (seeDarwin — Wedgwood family ).Barlow is a fellow of Trinity College,
University of Cambridge . He received the 1993Australia Prize for his research into the mechanisms of visual perception.Education
M.D., Harvard University, 1946
Selected References
*H. B. Barlow. Possible principles underlying the transformation of sensory messages. Sensory Communication, pp. 217-234, 1961
*H. B. Barlow. Single units and sensation: A neuron doctrine for perceptual psychology? Perception 1(4) 371 – 394, 1972
*H. B. Barlow, T. P. Kaushal, and G. J. Mitchison. Finding minimum entropy codes. Neural Computation, 1:412-423, 1989.
External links
* [http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/horacebarlow/ List and full text of Horace Barlow publications]
*Australia Prize [https://sciencegrants.dest.gov.au/SciencePrize/Pages/Doc.aspx?name=previous_winners/Aust1993Barlow.htm Biography of Barlow]
* [http://neurotree.org/neurotree/tree.php?pid=21 Horace Barlow in Neurotree]
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