A ring model for the development of simple cells in the visual cortex

Abstract

A model was proposed for the development of simple receptive fields in the cat visual cortex, based on the empirical evidence that the development is due to dark or spontaneous activities in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). We assumed that several cortical cells are arranged in a ring, with mutual excitatory and inhibitory connections of fixed weights; The cells also receive excitatory synapses from LGN cells, whose synaptic weights are initially set to be random and then modified according to the Hebb rule as well as to positive correlations among nearby LGN cells. Computer simulation showed that the cortical cells finally acquire two-dimensional simple receptive fields with their phases gradually varied along the ring. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.