Skip Nav Destination
Close Modal
Update search
NARROW
Format
Journal
TocHeadingTitle
Date
Availability
1-1 of 1
Graeme J. Mitchison
Close
Follow your search
Access your saved searches in your account
Would you like to receive an alert when new items match your search?
Sort by
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Neural Computation (1999) 11 (7): 1519–1526.
Published: 01 October 1999
Abstract
View article
PDF
It has recently been shown that orientation and retinotopic position, both of which are mapped in primary visual cortex, can show correlated jumps (Das & Gilbert, 1997). This is not consistent with maps generated by Kohonen's algorithm (Kohonen, 1982), where changes in mapped variables tend to be anticorrelated. We show that it is possible to obtain correlated jumps by introducing a Hebbian component (Hebb, 1949) into Kohonen's algorithm. This corresponds to a volume learning mechanism where synaptic facilitation depends not only on the spread of a signal from a maximally active neuron but also requires postsynaptic activity at a synapse. The maps generated by this algorithm show discontinuities across which both orientation and retinotopic position change rapidly, but these regions, which include the orientation singularities, are also aligned with the edges of ocular dominance columns, and this is not a realistic feature of cortical maps. We conclude that cortical maps are better modeled by standard, non-Hebbian volume learning, perhaps coupled with some other mechanism (e.g., that of Ernst, Pawelzik, Tsodyks, & Sejnowski, 1999) to produce receptive field shifts.