Population coding in the retina

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Volumn 8, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 488-493

  Nirenberg, Sheila ^a   Latham, Peter E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ELECTRODE; NEUROBIOLOGY; NONHUMAN; PRIORITY JOURNAL; RETINA GANGLION CELL; REVIEW; VISUAL DISCRIMINATION; VISUAL INFORMATION; VISUAL STIMULATION;

EID: 0032144097     PISSN: 09594388     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/S0959-4388(98)80036-6     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. DeVries SH, Baylor DA. Mosaic arrangement of ganglion cell receptive fields in rabbit retina. of special interest J Neurophysiol. 78:1997;2048-2060 A multi-electrode recording study of the ganglion cell types of the rabbit retina. The authors classified eleven different physiological types and determined their receptive fields and spatial arrangement in the retina. This provides important, detailed information about how the different cell types are spatially arranged to encode the visual world.
2. Smirnakis SM, Berry MJ, Warland DK, Bialek W, Meister M. Adaptation of retinal processing to image contrast and spatial scale. of special interest Nature. 386:1997;69-73 A multi-electrode recording study that examined network adaptation. The authors showed that the retina adapts not only to light, but also to the statistics of the light pattern. This latter adaptation was found to occur on a scale of seconds, about a hundred times more slowly than the light response.
3. Berry MJ, Warland DK, Meister M. The structure and precision of retinal spike trains. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 94:1997;5411-5416 A multi-electrode recording study that examined the reproducibility of ganglion cell responses. The authors presented the retina with a random flicker stimulus and measured the trial-to-trial variation in responses. They found that ganglion cells responded with brief periods of firing, called 'firing events', and that these events were highly reproducible: the jitter from trial to trial was as low as 1 ms. In addition, they found that the information conveyed by the timing of the firing events was much greater than that conveyed by the number of spikes per events.
4. of special interest Nirenberg S, Meister M. The light response of retinal ganglion cells is truncated by a displaced amacrine circuit. of special interest Neuron. 18:1997;637-650 A multi-electrode recording study that examined how retinal ganglion cell responses are generated. The authors investigated how a set of amacrine cells contributes to the formation of transient ganglion cell responses. They ablated the amacrine cells and found that transient responses became prolonged. This indicated that these responses are shaped, at least in part, by a circuit mechanism, rather than a cellular mechanism. In addition, the circuit must involve delayed inhibition.
5. Jabobs A, Werblin F. Spatiotemporal patterns at the retinal output. of special interest J Neurophysiol. 80:1998;447-451 The authors used an innovative technique to estimate multiple cell responses from single-cell recordings: instead of showing the same stimulus while recording from different cells, one cell was monitored while a stimulus was presented sequentially at different spatial locations. By assuming translation invariant responses and disregarding correlations, the authors were able to use their single-cell recordings to construct the response of a population of cells.
6. Warland DK, Reinagel P, Meister M. Decoding visual information from a population of retinal ganglion cells. J Neurophysiol. 78:1997;2336-2350 The authors investigated how a time-varying stimulus is encoded by a population of retinal ganglion cells. They attempted to reconstruct the stimulus from the spike trains of ganglion cells using two reconstruction strategies: a linear reconstruction method and a neural network (nonlinear) method. The linear reconstruction performed as well as the nonlinear method, indicating that most of the information about the stimulus was contained in linear operations on the spike trains.
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18. Brivanlou IH, Warland DK, Meister M. Mechanisms of concerted firing among ganglion cells. of special interest Neuron. 20:1998;1-20 The authors characterized correlated activity in the retina and investigated the underlying circuit mechanisms. Three types of correlated activity were found: broad (firing within 40-100 ms), medium (firing within 10-50 ms) and narrow (firing within 1 ms). Disruption of chemical synaptic transmission affected the broad of correlations, but not the medium or narrow ones. This result, along with analysis of the strength and time course of the correlations, suggested that broad correlations are probably caused by shared photoreceptor input, that medium correlations are caused by shared input from an interneuron such as an amacrine cell, and that narrow correlations are caused by gap junctions among ganglion cells.