In RF-LISSOM, the neurons receive inputs from local receptive fields on the retina instead of the entire retina as in SOM and LISSOM. This extension leads to realistic modeling of how the receptive fields develop into orientation, ocularity, and size detectors, how the neurons become globally ordered into orientation, ocular dominance, and size columns, and how patterned lateral connections develop between them. Such a structure forms a sparse, redundancy-reduced representation of the visual input and can account for several plasticity phenomena in the adult cortex. The self-organization is activity-dependent and driven by the input from the external environment, or by patterns generated internally.
