A spherical model for orientation and spatial–frequency tuning in a cortical hypercolumn

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Abstract
A theory is presented of the way in which the hypercolumns in primary visual cortex (V1) are organized to detect important features of visual images, namely local orientation and spatial–frequency. Given the existence in V1 of dual maps for these features, both organized around orientation pinwheels, we constructed a model of a hypercolumn in which orientation and spatial–frequency preferences are represented by the two angular coordinates of a sphere. The two poles of this sphere are taken to correspond, respectively, to high and low spatial–frequency preferences.