Retinal ganglion cells act largely as independent encoders
Retinal ganglion cells act largely as independent encoders
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DOI：
10.1038/35079612
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发表时间：
2001-06-01
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Latham, PE
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Nirenberg, S;Carcieri, SM;Latham, PE
神经元间的相关放电在视觉系统中广泛存在。相邻的神经元，从视网膜到皮层，往往会比预期的偶然更频繁地一起放电。这种相关放电对编码视觉信息的重要性尚不清楚且存在争议（1-5）。这里我们来看看它在视网膜中的重要性。我们给视网膜自然刺激，并记录其输出细胞，神经节细胞的反应。然后，我们使用信息理论技术来测量在两种情况下可以从细胞获得的关于刺激的信息量：当它们的相关放电被考虑时，以及当它们的相关放电被忽略时。我们发现，超过90%的刺激信息可以从细胞中获得，当它们的相关放电被忽略。这表明神经节细胞在很大程度上独立地编码信息，这大大简化了解码其活动的问题。
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 controversial(1-5). 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 rnd 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.