Numbers of specific types of neuron in layer IVab of cat striate cortex.

Layer IVab of the visual cortex (area 17) of the cat contains about 51,400 neurons per mm3, including about 400-1200 per mm3 of each of three categories of neuron believed from previous work to represent discrete types. Each type forms about 0.5-1.5% of all the IVab neurons, which suggests that the total number of types in this layer might be much greater than previously supposed, perhaps as many as 50 or more. From their densities and estimates of their dendritic fields, we calculate that each type completely "covers" layer IVab in the tangential plane but only by a small factor (1.3-4.2).