Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18 (NIPS 2005)
Brian Taba, Kwabena Boahen
We demonstrate the first fully hardware implementation of retinotopic self-organization, from photon transduction to neural map formation. A silicon retina transduces patterned illumination into correlated spike trains that drive a population of silicon growth cones to automatically wire a topographic mapping by migrating toward sources of a diffusible guidance cue that is released by postsynaptic spikes. We varied the pat- tern of illumination to steer growth cones projected by different retinal ganglion cell types to self-organize segregated or coordinated retinotopic maps.