Li Zhaoping is known as the creator of the
V1 Saliency Hypothesis, V1SH (pronounced 'vish'), that the primary visual cortex (V1) in primates creates a saliency map of the visual field to guide visual attention or gaze shifts exogenously. Proposed in the late-1990s, V1SH was unpopular initially, since it was contrary to the main and popular idea that the frontal and parietal areas of the brain are responsible for the saliency map. As V1SH gathered more experimental support, Zhaoping became more sought after for keynote or invited speeches in international conferences, and V1SH rises from being unpopular to being controversial. Some report experimental data for the theory, while others report evidence against it. It is argued that if V1SH holds, then the framework to understand how our brain solves the vision problem should be substantially changed, as described by the Central-peripheral Dichotomy theory which in turn has its own experimental support. Zhaoping also used a model to propose that feedback from the
olfactory cortex to the olfactory bulb serves to segment odors from background for individual odor recognition and carries out other top-down controls, this proposal predicts and explains a diversity of behavioral and neural data. == References ==