RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Rapid Neural Coding in the Retina with Relative Spike Latencies
JF Science
JO Science
FD American Association for the Advancement of Science
SP 1108
OP 1111
DO 10.1126/science.1149639
VO 319
IS 5866
A1 Gollisch, Tim
A1 Meister, Markus
YR 2008
UL http://science.sciencemag.org/content/319/5866/1108.abstract
AB Natural vision is a highly dynamic process. Frequent body, head, and eye movements constantly bring new images onto the retina for brief periods, challenging our understanding of the neural code for vision. We report that certain retinal ganglion cells encode the spatial structure of a briefly presented image in the relative timing of their first spikes. This code is found to be largely invariant to stimulus contrast and robust to noisy fluctuations in response latencies. Mechanistically, the observed response characteristics result from different kinetics in two retinal pathways (“ON” and “OFF”) that converge onto ganglion cells. This mechanism allows the retina to rapidly and reliably transmit new spatial information with the very first spikes emitted by a neural population.