Receptive fields are a core property of cortical organization. Modern neuroimaging allows routine access to visual population receptive fields (pRFs), enabling investigations of clinical disorders. Yet how the underlying neural circuitry operates is controversial. The controversy surrounds observations that measurements of pRFs can change in healthy adults as well as in patients with a range of ophthalmological and neurological disorders. The debate relates to the balance between plasticity and stability of the underlying neural circuitry. We propose that to move the debate forward, the field needs to define the implied mechanism. First, we review the pRF changes in both healthy subjects and those with clinical disorders. Then, we propose a computational model that describes how pRFs can change in healthy humans. We assert that we can correctly interpret the pRF changes in clinical disorders only if we establish the capabilities and limitations of pRF dynamics in healthy humans with mechanistic models that provide quantitative predictions.

中文翻译：

---

视觉皮层组织如何通过眼科和神经科疾病改变。

感受野是皮层组织的核心属性。现代的神经影像学可以常规进入视觉人群感受野（pRF），从而可以对临床疾病进行调查。然而，潜在的神经回路如何运作仍存在争议。争议围绕着观察，即在健康的成年人以及一系列眼科和神经系统疾病患者中，pRF的测量值可能会改变。辩论涉及基本神经回路的可塑性和稳定性之间的平衡。我们建议，为了推动辩论的进行，该领域需要定义隐含的机制。首先，我们回顾了健康受试者和临床疾病患者中pRF的变化。然后，我们提出了一个计算模型，该模型描述了pRF如何在健康的人类中发生变化。