Effects of lateral competition in the primary visual cortex on the development of topographic projections and ocular dominance maps

Abstract

We present a Hebbian model for the development of cortical maps in the striate cortex that includes a parameter which represents the degree of lateral competition for activity between neurons. It has two well-known models as limiting cases: for weak competition we obtain a correlation-based learning (CBL) model and for strong lateral competition we recover the self-organizing map (SOM). We show that increasing the competition for positively correlated localized stimuli leads to a sharp transition from an unorganized map to a topographic projection and subsequently to a topographic map with OD and locally magnified OD stripes.