A Marker-based Model for the Ontogenesis of Routing Circuits.pdfVIP

A Marker-based Model for the Ontogenesis of Routing Circuits Philipp Wolfrum1 and Christoph von der Malsburg1,2 1 Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, D-60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany 2 Computer Science Dept., University of Southern California, LA 90089-2520, USA Abstract. We present a model for the ontogenesis of information routing archi- tectures in the brain based on chemical markers guiding axon growth. The model produces all-to-all connectivity between given populations of input and output nodes using a minimum of cortical resources (links and intermediate nodes). The resulting structures are similar to architectures proposed in the literature, but with interesting qualitative differences making them biologically more plausible. Keywords: information routing, shifter circuits, dynamic links, visual cortex 1 Introduction An important part of brain function is the routing of information between different ar- eas. The routes along which information flows cannot be static, but must be adaptable to the current requirements. The most prominent example for this necessity is visual attention, where a certain mechanism ensures that only a selected portion of the visual input reaches higher visual “target areas” like inferotemporal cortex (IT). Other exam- ples in which information routing may be very useful include pitch-invariant recogni- tion of melodies, or our ability to combine arbitrary words into grammatically correct sentences. Such abilities require routing structures that provide physical connections between all locations in a certain input region and all locations of a target area. The necessity for dynamic information routing was appreciated early on [1], and models for its use in object recognition [2] and for frame-of-reference transforms [3] have been put forward. All-to-all routing between large cortical areas has to happen via intermediate stages to be biologically plausible (see problem definition in Sect. 2 and [4] for a detailed discussion).