Section: New Results

Distributed Self-Organization

The formation of the sensory homunculus in the primary sensory cortex (SI) is believed to be the result of a dynamic neural self-organization process that starts before birth and lasts for several years, allowing the brain to cope with sensory or brain lesions. The exact neural mechanisms driving this self-organization are not yet known and the role of the somatosensory attention remains unclear in this picture. We thus investigated the influence of somatosensory attention onto the two-dimensional structure of area 3b neuronal receptive fields (RFs) using a computational model [2] based on the dynamic neural field theory. This computational model of SI (area 3b) is able to explain experimental data in the monkey and hypothesizes role for the somatosensory attention in the shaping of SI receptive fields.