Random Retinal Waves are Sufficient to Establish Retinotopy in a Knowledge-Seeking Model of Primaory Visual Cortex

It has been argued that the retinotopic organization of primary visual cortex must be genetically determined ratherthan learned, because cortical retinotopy is fully established before the onset of patterned vision. However, retinal waves of traveling burst spiking characterize the embryonic previsual retina. It has been suggested that these randomly directed retinal waves carry sufficient information to establish cortical retinotopy. Here we show that a simple, well-known knowledge-seeking neural network model (Kohonen's self-organizing map algorithm) can extract full retinotopic organization from the previsual information contained in embryonic retinal waves, lending support to the neuronal empiricism hypothesis of cortical organization