Selective transfer of spatial patterns by presynaptic facilitation in a shunting competitive neural layer

Selective information transfer, self-generated modulation of cellular receptive field profiles and selective attention appear to be some of the important characteristics of biological neural systems that is not shared by the current state-of-the-art artificial neural networks. In this paper we describe a new competitive neural layer whose signal transmission gain may in general be modulated by a variety of methods. The processing capability of the layer and the nature of selective information transfer is demonstrated via computer simulations on several different examples, including visual images