Nonlinear receptive fields evoke redundant retinal coding of natural scenes.

The role of the vertebrate retina in early vision is generally described by the efficient coding hypothesis, which predicts that the retina reduces the redundancy inherent in natural scenes by discarding spatiotemporal correlations while preserving stimulus information. It is unclear, however, whether the predicted decorrelation and redundancy reduction in the activity of ganglion cells, the retina's output neurons, hold under gaze shifts, which dominate the dynamics of the natural visual input. We show here that species-specific gaze patterns in natural stimuli can drive correlated spiking responses both in and across distinct types of ganglion cells in marmoset as well as mouse retina.

Applying Super-Resolution and Tomography Concepts to Identify Receptive Field Subunits in the Retina.

Spatially nonlinear stimulus integration by retinal ganglion cells lies at the heart of various computations performed by the retina. It arises from the nonlinear transmission of signals that ganglion cells receive from bipolar cells, which thereby constitute functional subunits within a ganglion cell's receptive field. Inferring these subunits from recorded ganglion cell activity promises a new avenue for studying the functional architecture of the retina.

Retinal Encoding of Natural Scenes.

An ultimate goal in retina science is to understand how the neural circuit of the retina processes natural visual scenes. Yet most studies in laboratories have long been performed with simple, artificial visual stimuli such as full-field illumination, spots of light, or gratings. The underlying assumption is that the features of the retina thus identified carry over to the more complex scenario of natural scenes.

Nonlinear spatial integration in retinal bipolar cells shapes the encoding of artificial and natural stimuli.

The retina dissects the visual scene into parallel information channels, which extract specific visual features through nonlinear processing. The first nonlinear stage is typically considered to occur at the output of bipolar cells, resulting from nonlinear transmitter release from synaptic terminals. In contrast, we show here that bipolar cells themselves can act as nonlinear processing elements at the level of their somatic membrane potential.