Can the theory of "whitening" explain the center-surround properties of retinal ganglion cell receptive fields?

ABSTRACT: To account for the spatial and temporal response properties of the retina, a number of studies have proposed that these properties serve to "whiten" the visual input. In particular, it has been argued that the sensitivity of retinal ganglion cells is matched to the spatial frequency spectrum of natural scenes, resulting in a flattened or "whitened" response spectrum across a range of frequencies. However, we argue that there are two distinct hypotheses regarding the flattening of the spectrum. The decorrelation hypothesis proposes that the magnitude of each ganglion cell tuning curve rises with spatial frequency, resulting in a flattened response spectrum for natural scene stimuli. With appropriate sampling, this scheme allows neighboring neurons to be uncorrelated with each other. The res

SUBMITTER: Graham DJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1575921 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature