Noise components in Limulus vision.
Noise components in Limulus vision.
复制标题
鲎视觉中的噪声成分。
DOI:
10.1086/bblv187n2p261
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发表时间:
1994
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
BarlowJr,RB
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Dodge,FA;Porcello,DM;Dodge,SA;Kaplan,E;BarlowJr,RB
As a horseshoe crab moves along the bottom of a shallow bay, its lateral eye continuously transmits a picture of its environment back to his brain. This “video picture” contains only about 40 X 25 pixels, is blurred by the wide acceptance angle of the ommatidium, and is distorted by the way the eye samples visual space nonuniformly. Within the eye, two neural inhibitory processes enhance contrast, but the net result of all the steps in neural encoding is often a very noisy image. In spite ofthe rather poor image quality, neural circuits in the Limulus brain can extract visual information to guide the animal’s movements. Unattached males during the mating season provide a particularly straightforward example of visually guided behavior; they generally turn and approach any object that is about the size of a mate. As first reported here last year (l), we can record the neural signals that the brain receives as the eye scans the same targets used in the behavioral experiments. Analysis of several such experiments has revealed that targets at a distance beyond that of the behavioral threshold elicit a perceptible modulation of spike rate (2). This result is fully consistent with theoretical computations of the expected responses (3). If the behavioral threshold cannot be explained by the sensitivity of the photoreceptors, perhaps our experimental paradigms have consistently underestimated the noise that the animal must contend with under natural conditions. We have therefore started to study how the statistical properties of the random fluctuations in spike rate depend on differing visual environments. Two sources of noise that are intrinsic to the eye have been fully characterized; namely, the shot noise triggered by photon adsorption that is the excitatory input to the spike generator, and the summed inhibitory potential triggered by spikes in many neighbors. Because the unitary IPSP is longer than 0.5 s, it smooths nearly all fluctuations in its input and, in fact, makes only a minor contribution to the noise. The phototransduction noise can be quite large under dim ambient illumination, but decreases greatly as the eye adapts to higher illuminations. The power spectrum of this noise shows a relatively broad pass-band matching the dynamic transfer-function for sinusoidally modulated light (4). Phototransduction noise at illumination levels equivalent to the daylight field experiments (plus inhibitory synaptic noise) causes spike-rate fluctuations with a coefficient of variation (CV) of 7% or less.