A multidisciplinary team of researchers at Georgia Tech has discovered how lateral inhibition helps our brains process visual information, and it could expand our knowledge of sensory perception, leading to applications in neuro-medicine and artificial intelligence.

Lateral inhibition is when certain neurons suppress the activity of their neighboring neurons. Imagine an artist drawing, darkening the lines around the contours, highlighting the boundaries between objects and space, or objects and other objects. Comparably, in the visual system, lateral inhibition sharpens the contrast between different visual stimuli.

“This research is really getting at how our visual system not only highlights important things, but also actively suppresses irrelevant information in the background,” said lead researcher Bilal Haider, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “That ability to filter out distractions is crucial.”