Encoding of temporal information in the retina

描述(由申请者提供)：视网膜肩负着收集照射到眼睛上的光线并以一种有用的方式将这些信息传输到大脑的艰巨任务。这项研究的目的是探索视网膜如何翻译或编码时变的视觉信息。激励性的假设是，视网膜使用一种称为预测编码的高效方法来实现这一目标。我们计划使用火蜥蜴视网膜的电生理记录来验证这一假说。在这项研究中，我们将通过以下方式解决时变视觉输入的视网膜编码：1)确定神经节细胞棘波活动反映视觉刺激中精确的时间相关性的程度，2)确定这一预测在视网膜电路中的形成位置，以及3)将这些实验结果整合到视网膜如何编码视觉信息的计算模型中。拟议中的实验将扩展我们在视网膜中处理时间信息的知识。这些结果将与其他系统相关，并为理解神经元如何在其尖峰输出中表示时变信息提供了一个框架。

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.