Encoding of temporal information in the retina

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The retina has the monumental task of collecting light that impinges on the eye and transmitting this information in a useful way to the brain. The goal of this study is to explore how the retina translates or encodes time-varying visual information. The motivating hypothesis is that the retina uses a highly efficient method, called predictive encoding, to accomplish this goal. We plan to test this hypothesis using electrophysiological recordings from the salamander retina. This research we will address retinal encoding of time-varying visual inputs by: 1) Determining the extent to which ganglion cell spike activity reflects precise temporal correlations in the visual stimulus, 2) Determining where in the retinal circuitry this prediction is formed, and 3) Incorporating these experimental results into a computational model of how the retinal encodes visual information. The proposed experiments will extend our knowledge of temporal information processing in the retina. These results will be relevant to other systems and provide a framework for understanding how neurons represent time-varying information in their spike output.