Did anyone say that the matrix operation of convolution, or the idea of smearing it across an image, was invented via inspiration from experimental explication of image processing as performed by animals? I don't think they did, and I would be surprised if that were true. But those references do show that the "neocognitron" was explicitly inspired by actual physical neural networks used by animals for image processing, because among other things they include the original neocognitron paper, which is very clear about its inspiration. This is relevant because review papers of convolutional neural networks like this one from University College London almost universally identify the neocognitron as the direct precursor to modern convolutional neural networks.