How can the visual system process a natural scene in under 150 ms? On the role of asynchronous spike propagation
The human visual system can process previously unseen natural scenes in under 150 ms, even with extrafoveal viewing. Such data impose serious temporal constraints on the way in which information is processed. We argue that one of the keys to understanding this remarkable efficiency lies in the fact that biological vision makes use of asynchronous spike propagation, a feature absent in the vast majority of artificial neural networks. We describe our recent work that has explored the computational advantages of such asynchronous processing.