Abstract
We describe principles for cortical development which may apply both to the evolution of species, and to the antenatal development of the cortex of individuals. Our account depends upon the occurrence of synchronous oscillation in the neural field during embryonic development, and the assumption that synchrony is linked to cell survival during apoptosis . This leads to selection of arrays of neurons with ultra-small-world characteristics. The “degree of separation” power law is supplied by the combination of neuron sub-populations with differing exponential axonal tree distributions, and consequently, in the visual cortex , connections emerge in anatomically realistic patterns, with an ante-natal arrangement which projects signals from the surrounding cortex onto each macrocolumn, in a form analogous to the projection of a Euclidean plane onto a Möbius strip. Simulations of signal flow explain cortical responses to moving lines as functions of stimulus velocity, length and orientation. With the introduction of direct visual inputs, under the operation of Hebbian learning , development of mature selective response “tuning” to stimuli “features” then takes place, overwriting the earlier ante-natal configuration. Further assuming similar development principles apply to inter-areal interactions in the developing cortex, a general principle for the evolution of increasingly complicated sensory-motor sequences, at both species-evolution and individual time-scales, is implicit.
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The material in this chapter was presented at the First Neural Field Conference, Reading University, UK, (2010), with support of JJW. Special acknowledgement is made of the courage and generosity of Adrienne Wright, in enabling this work, and its presentation on that occasion.
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Wright, J.J., Bourke, P.D. (2014). Neural Field Dynamics and the Evolution of the Cerebral Cortex. In: Coombes, S., beim Graben, P., Potthast, R., Wright, J. (eds) Neural Fields. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54593-1_18
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