Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights of the Year

We designed a computational model of the primary somatosensory cortex that is able to develop topographic maps, maintain and reorganize them in the face of lesions. We used neural fields as a mathematical and computational framework and focused on area 3b innervated by hand mechanoreceptors. The combination of such neural field with a simple Hebbian/anti-Hebbian like learning rule advocates for an unsupervised, distributed, robust and biologically plausible model of a (simplified) somatosensory cortical model where thalamocortical connections are the main sites of plasticity. The major finding of our model is that a topographic map can emerge as a consequence of the interaction between thalamus and cortical excitatory afferent connections. These results were recently published in PLoS ONE [6] .