<title>Spatially congruent model for the striate visual cortex</title>

Abstract

A spatially congruent new model for the striate visual cortex (SVC) is proposed which accounts for some of the known functional and organizational properties of the superior mammalian SVC. Even though there is a broad consensus that the topographical representation of the visual field is one of the principal structuring principles underlying the SVC organization, the orientation maps in the SVC have often been described as non-topographical maps. In the present model, the adopted foot-of-normal representation of straight lines has allowed full congruency between the visual field topographic map and the orientation maps in the SVC. The proposed computational model includes three neural layers and assumes that the ocular dominance columns are already established at birth; three possibilities of neural mechanisms leading to orientation encoding are outlined and discussed. The model provides reasonable explanation to some of the most intriguing recently verified properties of the SVC such as the increased neural activity at the cytochrome oxidase blobs, the reduced orientation selectivity at these same places, and the pinwheel-like organization of the orientation selectivity in the SVC.