Spatio-temporal visual receptive fields as revealed by spatio-temporal random noise.

A means was devised to visualize the retinal receptive fields in time and space using the noise on unused television channels as spatio-temporal inputs and performing correlation between the input and output photographically. The method was applied to characterize the receptive fields of catfish retinal ganglion cells. The results were 1) there were two major types of receptive fields, circular and elliptical, 2) shapes and sizes of the field components changed with time (latency), and 3) a field's surround was often localized as hot spots.