Functional and Dynamical Consequences of Long-Range Patchy Connections in the Primary Visual Cortex

Abstract: While it is a known fact that higher mammals develop a differently structured primary visual cortex than rodents, the reason for this phenomenon remains unknown. Eutherian species that rely primarily on vision establish long-range patchy connections between locally clustered neurons. The V1 of rats and mice which use odour as their primary sensory input do not possess such a structural organisation and wiring profile. Albeit existing studies investigating the functional properties of networks with distal patchy connections, the dynamical consequences are still unclear. We hypothesised that the establishment of tuning-specific long-range patchy connections permits a better derivation of missing stimulus statistics from just sparse sampling. Although our results were not able to fully verify these claims, they indicate that locally clustered networks that exhibit tuning-dependent long-range connections enhance predictions based on sophisticated saccadic eye movements and the information aggregation over time and space.