Population connective field modeling reveals retinotopic visual cortex organization in the prenatal human brain

Abstract

AbstractThe visual space is sampled by cortical field maps in which nearby neuronal populations encode nearby locations of images received from the retina. Whether this retinotopic cortical organization already emerges in the prenatal human brain before visual experience is currently unknown. To answer this question in vivo, we applied population connective field modeling to 526 functional magnetic resonance imaging datasets ranging from prenatal to young adult age. We found retinotopically organized eccentricity and polar angle connectivity maps in V2 of the visual cortex as early as in the 21st week of gestation while connective field model fits increased significantly throughout development. These results highlight that retinotopic cortical maps develop in the second trimester of pregnancy, predating visual experience.