Cortical patterning is a field of developmental neuroscience which aims to determine how the various functional areas of the cerebral cortex are generated, what size and shape they will be, and how their spatial pattern across the surface of the cortex is specified.
[1] Today the field supports the idea of a 'protomap', which is a molecular pre-pattern of the cortical areas during early embryonic stages.
[3][4][5] This provides positional information for each stem cell, and regulates proliferation, neurogenesis, and areal identity.
After the initial establishment of areal identity, axons from the developing thalamus arrive at their correct cortical areal destination through the process of axon guidance and begin to form synapses.
Many activity-dependent processes are then thought to play important roles in the maturation of each area.