Rules of combination that generate climbing fiber tactile receptive fields

Climbing fiber tactile receptive fields in the anterior lobe of the cat's cerebellum are found to have regularities of shape, independent of their relative position on the cerebellar cortex. The shape regularities can be expressed as rules of combination that generate the receptive field shapes. Both face and paw receptive fields are unions of a certain set of skin areas called compartments. Face receptive fields are generated by taking the union of a seed compartment and another compartment in a binary relation to it, called CF-contiguity. Paw receptive fields are formed in a similar iterative fashion, with the constraint that anatomically equivalent areas be included on all toes involved in the receptive field. This paper specifies rules of combination that both reproduce observed receptive fields and also predict receptive fields that have not yet been observed. Because of the regularities of shape among the climbing fiber tactile receptive fields, the rules of combination can be used to predict ensemble activation in response to tactile stimulation.