Abstract
Summary form only given. The authors examine the goals of early stages of a perceptual system, before the signal reaches the cortex, and describe its operation in information-theoretic terms. The effects of receptor adaptation, lateral inhibition, and decorrelation can all be seen as part of an optimization of information throughput, given that available resources such as average power and maximum firing rates are limited. The authors suggest a modification to Gabor functions which improves their performance as band-pass filters.