Functional Organization for Direction Preference in Relation to Orientation and Ocular Dominance Maps

Abstract

The visual cortex contains overlaid feature maps for orientation preference, ocular dominance, and direction preference, which are shown by experiment to be correlated with rather than independent of each other. While the characteristics of the ocular dominance map in relation to the orientation preference map are systematically understood by analogy with other physical systems having the same topological characteristics, the original arrangement of direction preference oers a challenge for theories. Here, by extracting features from spatiotemporal input statistics through spike-timing dependent plasticity, we show how a neuron in the visual cortex acquires direction selectivity, such that the direction tends to be orthogonal to the orientation preference. Based on these results, we propose an abstract model for the joint map formation and classify what kind of direction preference map can develop in relation to orientation and ocular dominance maps.