@rhyolight - looking at your notes - how are you feeling about the possibility that the scope of a quilt dovetails to the local spread of activation fields?
Also - How are you feeling about the “well shuffled” part where the local features in the association area include a mix of local and distant sensing interspersed with other modalities? I can see how some of this would happen with level skipping between the maps and patches in each hierarchy.
It seems to me that these will have to be in the same local area to form an SDR that includes this information to do sensory fusion. If it is not done all in one space it will have to be done scattered over some map-2-map connections. Considering the known topology of the inter-map connections it seems likely that much of this fusion is done in the association areas.
or
https://www.cell.com/neuron/pdf/S0896-6273(15)00765-5.pdf
or
and
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(13)00221-0