A Brief History of the "Feature Detector"

The feature detector hypothesis, and its subsequent developmentinto the doctrine that single neurons code for perceptuallysignificant events, has been the leitmotiv of most work on sensorysystems. In the face of strong competition from the alternativetheories of neural networks and oscillating ensembles of neurons,the single neuron doctrine retains its grip on the imaginationof those working on the neural mechanisms of perception.