A potential application of self-organizing or topographic maps is clustering and visualization of high-dimensional data. It is well-known that an appropriate choice of the degree of smoothness in topographic maps is crucial for obtaining sensible results. Indeed, experimental evidence suggests that suitably monitored topographic maps should be preferred as they lead to more accurate performance...

We call "natural" image any photograph of an outdoor or indoor scene taken by a standard camera. We discuss the physical generation process of natural images as a combination of occlusions, transparencies and contrast changes. This description ts to the phenomeno-logical description of Gaetano Kanizsa according to which visual perception tends to remain stable with respect to these basic operat...

Recently, there has been an outburst of interest in extending topographic maps of vectorial data to more general data structures, such as sequences or trees. The representational capabilities and internal representations of the models are not well understood. We concentrate on a generalization of the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) for processing sequential data – the Recursive SOM (RecSOM [1]). We a...

The ability to orient toward visual, auditory, or tactile stimuli is an important skill for systems intended to interact with and explore their environment. In the brain of mammalian vertebrates, the Superior Colliculus is specialized for integrating multi-modal sensory information, and for using this information to orient the animal to the source sensory stimuli, such as noisy, moving objects....

In all mammals, much of the neocortex consists of orderly representations or maps of receptor surfaces that are typically topographic at a global level, while being modular at the local level. These representations appear to emerge in development as a result of a few interacting factors, and different aspects of brain maps may be developmentally linked. As a result, evolutionary selection for s...

This paper addresses the domain of qualitative spatial reasoning, addressing two distinct domains of spatial information: namely geometric proportional analogies (GPA) and topographic (land-cover) maps. We present an analogy-based model that unites two distinct models that were developed, one for GPAs and the other for topographic maps. We describe how this new generalized model solves GPAs and...

Humans and many animals analyze sensory information to estimate quantities that guide behavior and decisions. These quantities include numerosity (object number) and object size. Having recently demonstrated topographic maps of numerosity, we ask whether the brain also contains maps of object size. Using ultra-high-field (7T) functional MRI and population receptive field modeling, we describe t...