@Article{wood1999:topographic,
  author =       {Wood, R. J. and Schwartz, E. L.},
  title =        {Topographic shear and the relation of ocular
                  dominance columns to orientation columns in primate
                  and cat visual cortex},
  journal =      {Neural Networks},
  volume =       12,
  number =       2,
  pages =        {205--210},
  month =        Mar,
  year =         1999,
  datestr =      199903,
  INSPEC =       6213147,
  abstract =     {Shear has been known to exist for many years in the
                  topographic structure of the primary visual cortex,
                  but has received little attention in the modeling
                  literature. We make a functional hypothesis: the
                  major axis of the topographic shear tensor provides
                  cortical neurons with a preferred direction of
                  orientation tuning. We demonstrate that isotropic
                  neuronal summation of a sheared topographic map, in
                  the presence of additional random shear, can provide
                  the major features of cortical functional
                  architecture with the ocular dominance column system
                  acting as the principal source of the shear
                  tensor. The major principal axis of the shear tensor
                  determines the direction and its eigenvalues the
                  relative strength of cortical orientation
                  preference. This hypothesis is shown to be
                  qualitatively consistent with a variety of
                  experimental results on cat and monkey orientation
                  column properties obtained from optical recording
                  and from other anatomical and physiological
                  techniques. We also show that the result of
                  Das-Gilbert (1997) is consistent with an infinite
                  set of parametrized solutions for the cortical map.},
  keywords =     {Visual cortex; Orientation columns; Ocular dominance
                  columns; Singularities; Topography},
}