Plasticity and Cortical Development Paper available

[Jeff Shrager]

The following paper is available in hardcopy upon request. (Please send a
message in which your name and address appear in a format that can be
cut-and-pasted onto an envelope.)

  Shrager, J. & Johnson, M. H. (in press). Modeling the development
  of cortical function.  To appear in I. Kovacs & B. Julesz (Eds.),
  Maturational Windows and Cortical Plasticity [working title and
  editors list].  Santa Fe, NM: The Santa Fe Institute.

Our goal in this work is to investigate the factors that give rise to the
functional organization of the mammalian cerebral cortex during early brain
development.  We hypothesize that the cortex is organized through a
combination of endogenous and exogenous influences including subcortical
structuring, maturational timing, and the information structure of the
organism's early environment. In this paper we demonstrate, via
computational neural modeling, the way in which these influences can lead
to differential cortical function, and to the differential distribution of
function over the cortical sheet.  In three computational studies, using a
modified version of a model of cortical development due originally to
Kerszberg, Dehaene, and Changeux, we demonstrate that stimulus
correlations, structural targeting (of subcortex to cortex), spatial
structure in the stimulus, and, most importantly, waves of neural trophic
factor have predictable effects upon the modular structure and degree of
functionality represented in the resulting cortical sheet.