Activity Correlations between Direction-Selective Retinal Ganglion Cells Synergistically Enhance Motion Decoding from Complex Visual Scenes.

ABSTRACT: Neurons in sensory systems are often tuned to particular stimulus features. During complex naturalistic stimulation, however, multiple features may simultaneously affect neuronal responses, which complicates the readout of individual features. To investigate feature representation under complex stimulation, we studied how direction-selective ganglion cells in salamander retina respond to texture motion where direction, velocity, and spatial pattern inside the receptive field continuously change. We found that the cells preserve their direction preference under this stimulation, yet their direction encoding becomes ambiguous due to simultaneous activation by luminance changes. The ambiguities can be resolved by considering populations of direction-selective cells with different preferred di

SUBMITTER: Kuhn NK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6424814 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature