Local populations of neurons in mouse visual cortex exhibit diverse tuning preferences. We show this seeming disorder can be untangled — the similarity of tuning between pairs of neurons is correlated better with the overlap between their receptive fields in visual space rather than with their distance in the cortex. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that salt-and-pepper maps arise from the lateral dispersion of clonally related neurons.

Untangling cortical maps in mouse primary visual cortex