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Original Research ARTICLE

Modeling multisensory enhancement with self-organizing maps

1
Department of Computer Science, School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
2
Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology. Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, Richmond, VA, USA
Self-organization, a process by which the internal organization of a system changes without supervision, has been proposed as a possible basis for multisensory enhancement (MSE) in the superior colliculus (Anastasio and Patton, 2003 ). We simplify and extend these results by presenting a simulation using traditional self-organizing maps, intended to understand and simulate MSE as it may generally occur throughout the central nervous system. This simulation of MSE: (1) uses a standard unsupervised competitive learning algorithm, (2) learns from artificially generated activation levels corresponding to driven and spontaneous stimuli from separate and combined input channels, (3) uses a sigmoidal transfer function to generate quantifiable responses to separate inputs, (4) enhances the responses when those same inputs are combined, (5) obeys the inverse effectiveness principle of multisensory integration, and (6) can topographically congregate MSE in a manner similar to that seen in cortex. Thus, the model provides a useful method for evaluating and simulating the development of enhanced interactions between responses to different sensory modalities.
Keywords:
multisensory integration, artificial neural networks, competitive learning, self-organization, computational modeling, superior colliculus
Citation:
Martin JG, Meredith MA and Ahmad K (2009). Modeling multisensory enhancement with self-organizing maps. Front. Comput. Neurosci. 3:8. doi: 10.3389/neuro.10.008.2009
Received:
13 January 2009;
 Paper pending published:
08 February 2009;
Accepted:
04 June 2009;
 Published online:
24 June 2009.

Edited by:

Israel Nelken, Hebrew University, Israel

Reviewed by:

Bruno Averbeck,Institute of Neurology, University College London, UK
Andrew King, McGill University, Canada
Copyright:
© 2009 Martin, Meredith and Ahmad. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.
*Correspondence:
Jacob G. Martin, Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University Medical Center, WP-07 New Research Building, 3970 Reservoir Road, North West, Washington, DC 20007, USA. e-mail: jm733@georgetown.edu

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