NIPS preprint available

[Geoff Goodhill]

The following NIPS preprint is available via

      ftp://salk.edu/pub/geoff/goodhill_nips96.ps.Z
or
      http://cnl.salk.edu/~geoff

                    OPTIMIZING CORTICAL MAPPINGS

  Geoffrey J. Goodhill(1), Steven Finch(2) & Terrence J. Sejnowski(3)

         (1) The Salk Institute for Biological Studies
   10010 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA

           (2) Human Communication Research Centre
         University of Edinburgh, 2 Buccleuch Place
              Edinburgh EH8 9LW, GREAT BRITAIN

           (3) The Howard Hughes Medical Institute 
          The Salk Institute for Biological Studies
     10010 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
                                &
                     Department of Biology
    University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA,

                            ABSTRACT

``Topographic'' mappings occur frequently in the brain. A popular
approach to understanding the structure of such mappings is to map
points representing input features in a space of a few dimensions to
points in a 2 dimensional space using some self-organizing algorithm.
We argue that a more general approach may be useful, where
similarities between features are not constrained to be geometric
distances, and the objective function for topographic matching is
chosen explicitly rather than being specified implicitly by the
self-organizing algorithm.  We investigate analytically an example of
this more general approach applied to the structure of interdigitated
mappings, such as the pattern of ocular dominance columns in primary
visual cortex.