10 Facts About Receptive field

Receptive field, or sensory space, is a delimited medium where some physiological stimuli can evoke a sensory neuronal response in specific organisms.

Term receptive field was first used by Sherrington in 1906 to describe the area of skin from which a scratch reflex could be elicited in a dog.

The receptive field of a single photoreceptor is a cone-shaped volume comprising all the visual directions in which light will alter the firing of that cell.

Receptive field is often identified as the region of the retina where the action of light alters the firing of the neuron.

Each receptive field is arranged into a central disk, the "center", and a concentric ring, the "surround", each region responding oppositely to light.

Stimulation of the center of an on-center cell's receptive field produces depolarization and an increase in the firing of the ganglion cell, stimulation of the surround produces a hyperpolarization and a decrease in the firing of the cell, and stimulation of both the center and surround produces only a mild response.

Center-surround receptive field organization allows ganglion cells to transmit information not merely about whether photoreceptor cells are exposed to light, but about the differences in firing rates of cells in the center and surround.

Term receptive field is used in the context of artificial neural networks, most often in relation to convolutional neural networks.

So, in a neural network context, the receptive field is defined as the size of the region in the input that produces the feature.

Specifically, the receptive field should be sufficient if it is larger than the largest flow magnitude of the dataset.