Cerebral cortex: Function and development

"Structure et Function dans le Systeme Visuel" was the title given to the first Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (INSERM) symposium held on this topic in Lyon in September 1986. Nine years later, its successor was held in the same place. What has changed? Well, the Salle Moliere has had a face-lift, and it would be difficult to think of a finer venue for a meeting of about 150 people. It is also salutary to spend 4 days debating science in a chamber so conspicuously dedicated to the arts. Fifteen of the speakers or coauthors at the first meeting were presenting their work again, and although some of us could be said to need a face-lift, there was a reassuring novelty about many of their contributions. Some old dogs do learn new tricks! The title, "Cerebral Cortex Function and Development," was much broader than that of its predecessor, but the proceedings, as often happens, revealed a narrower perspective, most of the contributions dealing with the visual system, with far fewer, albeit distinguished, excursions into somatosensory and language processes. It is particularly illuminating to compare the programs of the two meetings, for although their overall aims were similar--structure and function--the ways in which questions are tackled have shifted substantially in 9 years. Whereas about half of the platform presentations and posters in 1986 were devoted to the structure of the retina or to the classical receptive field properties of single neurons in the visual pathways, in 1995 the structure of the retina was barely mentioned, the emphasis on information processing was computational, model building was popular, the human (as opposed to feline or simian) cerebral cortex was frequently mentioned, functional neuroimaging reared its controversial head, and the studies of neural development embraced chemistry and dishes.