Abstract
Among his many contributions, Mountcastle is well-known for introducing and popularizing the fundamental concept of the cortical column (e.g., Mountcastle, 1957; 1978). Much earlier, the important view that cortex is subdivided into a patchwork of rather large, functional subdivisions, the cortical areas or fields, had become established (e.g., Brodmann 1909; von Economo, 1929), and other subsequent investigators had demonstrated that some cortical areas contain systematic representations of sensory surfaces (e.g., Adrian, 1941; Woolsey and Fairman, 1946). Mountcastle (1957) proposed the now widely accepted concept that cortical areas contain smaller functional units, often referred to as columns or modules, that extend perpendicularly across the cortical layers, are a millimeter or less in width, and contain neurons having some response properties in common that differ from those in other sets of columns (for review, see Towe, 1975; Szentagothai, 1975; Eccles, 1981; Jones, 1981). One result of this theoretical contribution is that studies of the connectivity of the brain have gone beyond attempts to understand sensory systems in terms of interconnected nuclei and areas, and have considered the connectivity of modular groups of neurons within areas (e.g., Livingstone and Hubel, 1988; DeYoe and Van Essen, 1988). Another outcome has been the growth of the original concept of place and modality specific columns into a family of ideas on how neurons are grouped to form modular units such as mini-columns (see Mountcastle, 1978), cell assemblies (see Shaw et al., 1982), barrels (Woolsey and Van der Loos, 1970), hypercolumns (Hubel and Wiesel, 1977) and segregates (Favorov et al., 1987). Rather than extensively discuss these developments, my more limited goal here is to review evidence for certain types of selectivity of inputs for terminating in specific locations or on specific neurons, and the relative strengths of these and other factors (see Constantine-paton, 1982).
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Kaas, J.H. (1991). The Parcellation of Somatosensory Cortex: Modules, Columns and Somatotopic Segregations. In: Franzén, O., Westman, J. (eds) Information Processing in the Somatosensory System. Wenner-Gren Center International Symposium Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11597-6_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11597-6_15
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