Multiplexed computations in retinal ganglion cells of a single type

Stéphane Deny (1) , Ulisse Ferrari (1) , Emilie Macé (1) , Pierre Yger (1) , Romain P Caplette (1) , Serge Picaud (1) , Gašper Tkačik (2) , Olivier Marre (1)

1 Institut de la Vision
2 IST Austria - Institute of Science and Technology [Klosterneuburg, Austria]

In the early visual system, cells of the same type perform the same computation in different places of the visual field. How these cells code together a complex visual scene is unclear. A common assumption is that cells of a single-type extract a single-stimulus feature to form a feature map, but this has rarely been observed directly. Using large-scale recordings in the rat retina, we show that a homogeneous population of fast OFF ganglion cells simultaneously encodes two radically different features of a visual scene. Cells close to a moving object code quasilinearly for its position, while distant cells remain largely invariant to the object's position and, instead, respond nonlinearly to changes in the object's speed. We develop a quantitative model that accounts for this effect and identify a disinhibitory circuit that mediates it. Ganglion cells of a single type thus do not code for one, but two features simultaneously. This richer, flexible neural map might also be present in other sensory systems.

Domaines: Médecine humaine et pathologie

Stéphane Deny, Ulisse Ferrari, Emilie Macé, Pierre Yger, Romain P Caplette, et al.. Multiplexed computations in retinal ganglion cells of a single type. Nature Communications, 2017, 8 (1), pp.1964. ⟨10.1038/s41467-017-02159-y⟩. ⟨hal-01699587⟩