Computational role of eccentricity dependent cortical magnification

We develop a sampling extension of M-theory focused on invariance to scale and translation. Quite surprisingly, the theory predicts an architecture of early vision with increasing receptive field sizes and a high resolution fovea ‐ in agreement with data about the cortical magnification factor, V1 and the retina. From the slope of the inverse of the magnification factor, M-theory predicts a cortical “fovea” in V1 in the order of 40 by 40 basic units at each receptive field size ‐ corresponding to a foveola of size around 26 minutes of arc at the highest resolution, 6 degrees at the lowest resolution. It also predicts uniform scale invariance over a fixed range of scales independently of eccentricity, while translation invariance should depend linearly on spatial frequency. ≈ (B)