Design principles of columnar organization in visual cortex

• Authors: Ernst Niebur;Florentin Wörgötter
• Venue: Neural Computation
• Year: 1994

Visual space is represented by cortical cells in an orderlymanner. Only little variation in the cell behavior is found withchanging depth below the cortical surface, that is, all cells in acolumn with axis perpendicular to the cortical plane haveapproximately the same properties (Hubel and Wiesel 1962, 1963,1968). Therefore, the multiple features of the visual space (e.g.,position in visual space, preferred orientation, and orientationtuning strength) are mapped on a two-dimensional space, thecortical plane. Such a dimension reduction leads to complex maps(Durbin and Mitchison 1990) that so far have evaded an intuitiveunderstanding. Analyzing optical imaging data (Blasdel 1992a, b;Blasdel and Salama 1986; Grinvald et al. 1986) using atheoretical approach we will show that the most salient features ofthese maps can be understood from a few basic design principles:local correlation, modularity, isotropy, and homogeneity. Theseprinciples can be defined in a mathematically exact sense in theFourier domain by a rather simple annulus-like spectral structure.Many of the models that have been developed to explain the mappingof the preferred orientations (Cooper et al. 1979; Legendy1978; Linsker 1986a, b; Miller 1992; Nass and Cooper 1975;Obermayer et al. 1990, 1992; Soodak 1987; Swindale 1982,1985, 1992; von der Malsburg 1973; von der Malsburg and Cowan 1982)are quite successful in generating maps that are close toexperimental maps. We suggest that this success is due to theseprinciples, which are common properties of the models and ofbiological maps.