title: Do cortical maps adapt to optimize information density?
abstract: Topographic maps are found in many biological and artificial neural systems. In biological systems, some parts of these can form a significantly expanded representation of their sensory input, such as the representation of the fovea in the visual cortex. We propose that a cortical feature map should be organized to optimize the efficiency of information transmission through it. This leads to a principle of uniform cortical information density across the map as the desired optimum. An expanded representation in the cortex for a particular sensory area (i.e. a high magnification factor) means that a greater information density is concentrated in that sensory area, leading to finer discrimination thresholds. Improvement may ultimately be limited by the construction of the sensors themselves. This approach gives a good fit to threshold versus cortical area data of Recanzone et al on owl monkeys trained on a tactile frequency-discrimination task.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronic Engineering, King's College London, Strand, UK. Mark.Plumbley@kcl.ac.uk
authors.forename: M D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Plumbley
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D007257:Information Theory; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D013003:Somatosensory Cortex / Q000502:physiology