Decorrelation and efficient coding by retinal ganglion cells.

ABSTRACT: An influential theory of visual processing asserts that retinal center-surround receptive fields remove spatial correlations in the visual world, producing ganglion cell spike trains that are less redundant than the corresponding image pixels. For bright, high-contrast images, this decorrelation would enhance coding efficiency in optic nerve fibers of limited capacity. We tested the central prediction of the theory and found that the spike trains of retinal ganglion cells were indeed decorrelated compared with the visual input. However, most of the decorrelation was accomplished not by the receptive fields, but by nonlinear processing in the retina. We found that a steep response threshold enhanced efficient coding by noisy spike trains and that the effect of this nonlinearity was near opt

SUBMITTER: Pitkow X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3725273 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature