Developing Topography and Ocular Dominance Using Two aVLSI Vision Sensors and a Neurotrophic Model of Plasticity

A neurotrophic model for the co-development of topography and ocular dominance columns in the primary visual cortex has recently been proposed. In the present work, we test this model by driving it with the output of a pair of neuronal vision sensors stimulated by disparate moving patterns. We show that the temporal correlations in the spike trains generated by the two sensors elicit the development of refined topography and ocular dominance columns, even in the presence of significant amounts of spontaneous activity and fixed-pattern noise in the sensors.