Development and Spatial Structure of Cortical Feature Maps: A Model Study
Klaus Obermayer, Helge Joachim Ritter, Klaus J. Schulten · PUB – Publications at Bielefeld University (Bielefeld University) · 1990
Feature selective cells in the primary visual cortex of several species are organized in hierarchical topographic maps of stimulus features like "position in visual space", "orientation" and "ocular dominance". In order to understand and describe their spatial structure and their development, we investigate a self-organizing neural network model based on the feature map algorithm. The model explains map formation as a dimension-reducing mapping from a high-dimensional feature space onto a two-dimensional lattice, such that "similarity" between the corresponding feature selective cells. The model is able to reproduce several aspects of the spatial structure of cortical maps in the visual cortex.