Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 5 (NIPS 1992)
Geoffrey Goodhill
A new computational model that addresses the formation of both topog- raphy and ocular dominance is presented. This is motivated by exper- imental evidence that these phenomena may be subserved by the same mechanisms. An important aspect of this model is that ocular domi- nance segregation can occur when input activity is both distributed, and positively correlated between the eyes. This allows investigation of the dependence of the pattern of ocular dominance stripes on the degree of correlation between the eyes: it is found that increasing correlation leads to narrower stripes. Experiments are suggested to test whether such be- haviour occurs in the natural system.