Local receptive fields

[Tom Dietterich]

I am confused by what appear to be two different usages of the term
"local receptive fields", and I wonder if anyone can un-confuse me.

In papers about radial basis functions (e.g., Moody and Darken, Poggio
and Girosi, etc.) the (single) layer of hidden units are described as
having local receptive fields.  However, these hidden units receive
input from EVERY input unit, which strikes me as being more global
than local.  It is true, however, that each hidden unit will respond
to only a few of the possible input vectors, and that this
behavior can be described in terms of the "distance" between the
input vector and the weight vector of the hidden unit.  So in this
sense, the hidden unit is responsive to a particular locality in the
Euclidean n-space containing the input vectors.

On the other hand, in papers such as those by Waibel et al on phoneme
recognition or by LeCun et al on handwritten digit recognition, the
hidden units have connections to only a few of the input units.  These
hidden units are also described as having local receptive fields.