Limulus vision in the marine environment.

Horseshoe crabs use vision to find mates. They can reliably detect objects resembling potential mates under a variety of lighting conditions. To understand how they achieve this remarkable performance, we constructed a cell based realistic model of the lateral eye to compute the ensembles of optic nerve activity ("neural images") it transmits to the brain.

Cell-based model of the Limulus lateral eye.

We present a cell-based model of the Limulus lateral eye that computes the eye's input to the brain in response to any specified scene. Based on the results of extensive physiological studies, the model simulates the optical sampling of visual space by the array of retinal receptors (ommatidia), the transduction of light into receptor potentials, the integration of excitatory and inhibitory signals into generator potentials, and the conversion of generator potentials into trains of optic nerve impulses. By simulating these processes at the cellular level, model ommatidia can reproduce response variability resulting from noise inherent in the stimulus and the eye itself, and they can adapt to changes in light intensity over a wide operating range.

Deciphering a neural code for vision.

Deciphering the information that eyes, ears, and other sensory organs transmit to the brain is important for understanding the neural basis of behavior. Recordings from single sensory nerve cells have yielded useful insights, but single neurons generally do not mediate behavior; networks of neurons do. Monitoring the activity of all cells in a neural network of a behaving animal, however, is not yet possible.

Adapting bump model for ventral photoreceptors of Limulus.

Light-evoked current fluctuations have been recorded from ventral photoreceptors of Limulus for light intensity from threshold up to 10(5) times threshold. These data are analyzed in terms of the adapting bump noise model, which postulates that (a) the response to light is a summation of bumps; and (b) the average size of bump decreases with light intensity, and this is the major mechanism of light adaptation. It is shown here that this model can account for the data well.

Dispersion of latencies in photoreceptors of Limulus and the adapting-bump model.

To light stimuli of very low intensity, Limulus photoreceptors give a voltage response with a fluctuating delay. This phenomenon has been called "latency dispersion." If the generator potential is the superposition of discrete voltage events ("bumps"), and if the effect of light upon bump size is negligible, then the latency dispersion and the bump shape completely characterize the frequency response to sinusoidal flicker.

Rapid dark recovery of the invertebrate early receptor potential.

The recovery in the dark of the early receptor potential, as a direct manifestation of the state of the visual pigments, has been studied by intracellular recording in the ventral photoreceptors of Limulus and lateral photoreceptors of Balanus. The recovery is exponential with 1/e time constants of about 80 ms at 24 degrees C for both preparations and 1800 ms at 4 degrees C for Balanus. The 24 degrees C rate extrapolates to total recovery of the pigment within 2 s.