Lateral Interactions in Visual Cortex
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
A common pattern of connections seen in cortex is a plexus of long-range projections, intrinsic to the cortical areas in which the projecting cells reside. These connections were initially discovered with the use of intracellular injection techniques. The evidence from earlier Golgi studies led to the idea that cortical connections were primarily vertical, running across the cortical layers and with relatively little lateral spread. This view coincided with studies showing columnar functional architecture of cortex. The subsequent finding of the long-range horizontal connections seemed to violate the principles of retinotopic order of visual cortex, since they allow cells to integrate information over a much larger part of visual field than one would expect from their receptive field maps. These connections also make one question how columnar properties could be maintained, considering that they cross columnar boundaries. In this paper, we present evidence that the horizontal connections bear a specific relationship...
