The thalamocortical pathway is the main route of communication between the eye and the cerebral cortex. During embryonic development, thalamocortical afferents travel to L4 and are sorted by receptive field position, eye of origin, and contrast polarity (i.e., preference for light or dark stimuli). In primates and carnivores, this sorting involves numerous afferents, most of which sample a limited region of the binocular field. Devoting abundant thalamocortical resources to process a limited visual field has a clear advantage: It allows many stimulus combinations to be sampled at each spatial location. Moreover, the sampling efficiency can be further enhanced by organizing the afferents in a cortical grid for eye input and contrast polarity. We argue that thalamocortical interactions within this eye-polarity grid can be used to represent multiple stimulus combinations found in nature and to build an accurate cortical map for multidimensional stimulus space.

中文翻译：

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丘脑皮质回路和功能结构。

丘脑皮质途径是眼睛与大脑皮层之间交流的主要途径。在胚胎发育过程中，丘脑皮质传入L4，并按感受野位置，起源眼和对比极性（即对亮或暗刺激的偏好）进行分类。在灵长类动物和食肉动物中，这种分类涉及大量传入子，其中大多数对双目视野的有限区域进行采样。投入大量的丘脑皮质资源来处理有限的视野具有明显的优势：它允许在每个空间位置采样许多刺激组合。此外，通过在皮质网格中组织传入人眼输入和对比极性的进样可以进一步提高采样效率。