Anatomical Origin and Computational Role of Diversity in the Response Properties of Cortical Neurons

Abstract

The maximization of diversity of neuronal response properties has been recently suggested as an organizing principle for the formation of such prominent features of the functional architecture of the brain as the cortical columns and the associated patchy projection patterns. We report a computational study of two aspects of this hypothesis. First, we show that maximal diversity is attained when the ratio of dendritic and axonal arbor sizes is equal to one, as it has been found in many cortical areas and across species. Second, we show that maximization of diversity leads to better performance in two case studies: in systems of receptive fields implementing steerable/shiftable filters, and in matching spatially distributed signals, a problem that arises in visual tasks such as stereopsis, motion processing, and recognition.