Juárez Paz, León Mauricio
(2012)
Retinal ensemble coding under dynamic conditions.
PhD, Universität Oldenburg.
Abstract
Spike trains of retinal ganglion cells transfer visual information from the eye to the brain. Since natural scenes comprise several visual features, this study investigates how the activity of retinal ganglion cells encodes motion information under dynamic light intensity conditions.
Multiple turtle and carp retinal ganglion cell responses to visual stimulation were recorded extracellularly. Encoding on different time scales was tested with two spike train metrics. Moreover, three mechanisms of combining the activity of multiple cells for visual coding were compared.
I found that retinal ganglion cells can encode motion features and light intensity simultaneously. While the firing rates encode static features like constant velocity, the fine temporal response structure mainly represents stimulus changes. Finally, the joint activity of several cells allows more efficient encoding, especially for complex stimulus features. Simultaneous encoding of several stimulus features requires the combination of different time scales and joint activity mechanisms.
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