Amari's 1977 neural-field paper is rooted in the reaction-diffusion morphogenesis literature, citing Turing (1952) as motivation and Maginu (1975) on stability

Shun'ichi Amari's "Dynamics of Pattern Formation in Lateral-Inhibition Type Neural Fields" (Biological Cybernetics 27:77–87, 1977) does not treat its pattern-formation problem as native to neuroscience. It situates that problem against the reaction-diffusion morphogenesis literature from its opening paragraph: "This problem has recently attracted much attention in relation to morphogenesis, and has been studied extensively using the reaction-diffusion model [e.g., Turing, 1952; Levin, 1974; see also Grossberg, 1976]." The reference list confirms the citation is to Turing's foundational paper itself — "Turing, A.: The chemical basis of morphogenesis. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. London B-237, 32–72 (1952)." The connection to Turing-style reaction-diffusion morphogenesis is therefore not a later external application but an explicit motivating comparison present at the paper's own point of origin.

The contact is not only rhetorical. When Amari confronts the difficulty of proving stability for his neural field's pattern dynamics, he reaches back into the same literature: "It is in general difficult to prove the stability of pattern dynamics (see, e.g., Maginu, 1975)" — the reference being "Maginu, K.: Reaction-diffusion equation describing morphogenesis. Math. Biosci. 27, 17–98 (1975)." So the reaction-diffusion-morphogenesis work functions twice: once as the motivating parallel in the introduction, and once as a cited mathematical resource for the neural-field analysis itself.

Both points of contact run in the direction morphogenesis → neural fields, the reverse of the direction implied by asking whether Amari's model was later applied to morphogenesis. On that reverse (and absent) direction, see claim-no-amari-1977-neural-field-application-to-morphogenesis-found; on the sibling negative finding for Amari's 1972 associative-memory model, see claim-no-amari-application-to-developmental-biology-found-pre-2016. The lateral-inhibition formalism here is the same object later reformulated by Wilson and Cowan (claim-wilson-cowan-and-amari-neural-field-formulations-are-the-same-object). The author's broader vault profile is at entity-shunichi-amari.