The sensory visual cortex has topographic mappings of stimulus dimensions. Visual field maps have been defined in the sensory visual cortex, where the nearby neurons represent adjacent points in the visual field (Inouye, 1909; Holmes, 1918).
At a larger scale, visual field maps are arranged in clusters, a group of maps with parallel eccentricity representations (Wandell et al. 2005). Each cluster's adjacent polar angle representations share a common eccentricity representation (Wandell et al. 2007). The maps near V1 are the prototypical cluster, and other clusters, such as V3AB, IPS, etc., have also been identified.
A schematic diagram of the organization of eccentricity representations of the visual cortex. Figure 9A of Wandell et al. (2007)
Eccentricity maps spanning 0–11 on a flattened left cortex. Figure 9B of Wandell et al. (2007)
In recent year, work from Curtis lab and Winawer lab at NYU proposed a nonlinear population receptive field (pRF) modeling, which reliably map and characterize the topographic organization of several regions in the human frontal and parietal cortex (Mackey et al., 2017). An example video of pRF mapping can be viewed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.22974.003.
Though the frontoparietal cortex is believed to reflect higher-order cognitive functions rather than external sensory processing, they discovered that polar angle and eccentricity representations are organized as clusters similar to the visual cortex. (Shockingly)
For my practice purpose, instead of reviewing each visual map's definition with the figures shown in literature like Mackey et al. (2017), I’d love to cover the topic with a real subject ROI that I’m drawing with AFNI-SUMA surface-based analysis.
