Topography may yield advantages for cortical stimulus processing, e.g., energy efficiency and increased robustness and processing speed.
Plasticity means that topographic structures depend dynamically on sensory experience.
We regard topographic structures as equilibrium states determined to large extend by the statistics of incoming stimuli. This is considered as a strategy to change the data format whereas the format of the neural processes operating on the data is kept constant. A universal learning process may generate different topographic structures, and may only allow certain types of stimulus topologies to be transferred into topography. At discrete times, spatial stimuli are presented to a neural network whose properties are successively adapted. The stimuli are chosen randomly according to a given probability distribution and independent of earlier stimulus choices.