Notes

To include the concept of masking in the model of V1 neurons, the model in the above figure has been proposed. It includes a divisive inhibition term in the model, which represent the inhibition of a neuron's response by the activity of other neurons. This divisive inhibition term is sensitive to the similarity between the preferred orientations of the neuron and its neighboring neurons. When the preferred orientations are similar, the inhibition is stronger, leading to greater masking.

Overall, the masking effect helps to sharpen the tuning of V1 neurons for specific visual features by reducing their responses to stimuli that are similar but not identical to their preferred features. This tuning is important for extracting relevant visual information from a complex visual scene.