Effects of Lateral Competition in the Primary Visual Cortex on the Development of Topographic Projections and Ocular Dominance Maps

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 incresing the competition for positively correlated localized stimuli leads to a sharp transition from an unorganized map to a topographic projection and subesequently to a topographic map with OD and locally magnified OD stripes. Key words: Hebbian learning; Cortical development; Self-organizing map; Correlation-based learning; 1 Hebbian development with lateral competition Our model (figure 1) consists of two populations L and R of neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) with activity patterns P Lu j and P Ru j originating from the left and right eye, respectively. This activi..