Retinal ganglion cells act largely as independent encoders

S. Nirenberg (), S. M. Carcieri, A. L. Jacobs and P. E. Latham
Additional contact information
S. Nirenberg: University of California Los Angeles
S. M. Carcieri: University of California Los Angeles
A. L. Jacobs: University of California Los Angeles
P. E. Latham: University of California Los Angeles

Nature, 2001, vol. 411, issue 6838, 698-701

Abstract: Abstract Correlated firing among neurons is widespread in the visual system. Neighbouring neurons, in areas from retina to cortex, tend to fire together more often than would be expected by chance. The importance of this correlated firing for encoding visual information is unclear and controversial1,2,3,4,5. Here we examine its importance in the retina. We present the retina with natural stimuli and record the responses of its output cells, the ganglion cells. We then use information theoretic techniques to measure the amount of information about the stimuli that can be obtained from the cells under two conditions: when their correlated firing is taken into account, and when their correlated firing is ignored. We find that more than 90% of the information about the stimuli can be obtained from the cells when their correlated firing is ignored. This indicates that ganglion cells act largely independently to encode information, which greatly simplifies the problem of decoding their activity.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35079612 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:411:y:2001:i:6838:d:10.1038_35079612

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35079612

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().