A theory of cortical map formation in the visual brain

• Published in: bioRxiv
• Main Authors: Najafian, Sohrab, Koch, Erin, Kai-Lun Teh, Jin, Jianzhong, Rahimi-Nasrabadi, Hamed, Zaidi, Qasim, Kremkow, Jens, Jose-Manuel, Alonso
• Format: Paper
• Language: English
• Published: Cold Spring Harbor Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 10.03.2022
• Subjects: Brain mapping; Cerebral cortex; Computational neuroscience; Cortex (somatosensory); Sampling; Sensory neurons; Species; Thalamus; Visual cortex
• DOI: 10.1101/2022.01.10.475662

The cerebral cortex receives multiple afferents from the thalamus that segregate by stimulus modality forming cortical maps for each sense. In vision, the primary visual cortex maps the multiple dimensions of the visual stimulus in patterns that vary across species for reasons unknown. Here we introduce a general theory of cortical map formation, which proposes that map diversity emerges from species variations in the thalamic afferent density sampling sensory space. In the theory, increasing afferent sampling density enlarges the cortical domains representing the same visual point, allowing the segregation of afferents and cortical targets by multiple stimulus dimensions. We illustrate the theory with an afferent-density model that accurately replicates the maps of different species through afferent segregation followed by thalamocortical convergence pruned by visual experience. Because thalamocortical pathways use similar mechanisms for axon segregation and pruning, the theory may extend to other sensory areas of the mammalian brain. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes * https://zenodo.org/record/6338697#.YioxFejMI2w