BCM network develops orientation selectivity and ocular dominance in natural scene environment.

A two-eye visual environment is used in training a network of BCM neurons. We study the effect of misalignment between the synaptic density functions from the two eyes, on the formation of orientation selectivity and ocular dominance in a lateral inhibition network. The visual environment we use is composed of natural images. We show that for the BCM rule a natural image environment with binocular cortical misalignment is sufficient for producing networks with orientation-selective cells and ocular dominance columns. This work is an extension of our previous single cell misalignment model Shouval et al., 1996.