Development and regeneration of the retinotectal map in goldfish: a computational study

We present a simple computational model to study the interplay of activity-dependent and intrin-sic processes thought to be involved in the formation of topographic neural projections. Our modelconsists of two input layers which project to one target layer. The connections between layers aredescribed by a set of synaptic weights. These weights develop according to three interacting develop-mental rules: (i) an intrinsic fibre-target interaction which generates chemospecific adhesion between afferent fibres and target cells; (ii) an intrinsic fibre-fibre interaction which generates mutual selective adhesion between the afferent fibres; and (iii) an activity-dependent fibre-fibre interaction whichimplements Hebbian learning. Additionally, constraints are imposed to keep synaptic weights nite.The model is applied to a set of eleven experiments on the regeneration of the retinotectal projectionin goldfish. We nd that the model is able to reproduce the outcome of an unprecedented range ofexperiments with the same set of model parameters, including details of the size of receptive andprojective fields. We expect this mathematical framework to be a useful tool for the analysis ofdevelopmental processes in general.

@Article{WRCO97, 
 	 author =  {Weber, Cornelius and Ritter, Helge and Cowan, Jack and Obermayer, Klaus},  
 	 title = {Development and regeneration of the retinotectal map in goldfish: a computational study}, 
 	 journal = {Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. Lond. B.},
 	 number = {},
 	 volume = {352},
 	 pages = {1603--1623},
 	 year = {1997},
 	 month = {Nov},
 	 publisher = {},
 	 doi = {10.1098/rstb.1997.0144}, 
 }