HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) All Versions of this Article: 100/2/1087    most recent 90527.2008v1 Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Werner, B. Articles by Passaglia, C. L. PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Werner, B. Articles by Passaglia, C. L.

Complex Temporal Response Patterns With a Simple Retinal Circuit

¹Program in Neuroscience, ²Department of Biology, and ³Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts

Submitted 3 May 2008; accepted in final form 21 June 2008

The retina can respond to a wide array of features in the visual input. It was recently reported that the retina can even recognize complicated temporal input patterns and signal violations in the patterns. When a sequence of flashes was presented, ganglion cells exhibited a variety of firing profiles and many cells showed an "omitted stimulus response" (OSR), in which they fired strongly if a flash in the sequence was omitted. We examined the synaptic origins of the OSR by recording excitatory synaptic currents from ganglion cells in the salamander retina in response to periodic flash sequences. Consistent with previous spike recordings, ganglion cells exhibited an OSR in their current response and the OSR shifted in time with a change in flash frequency such that it could predict when the next flash should have occurred. Although the behavior may seem sophisticated, we show that a simple linear–nonlinear model with a spike threshold can account for the OSR in ON ganglion cells and that the variety of complex firing profiles seen in other ganglion cells can be explained by adding contributions from the OFF pathway. We discuss the physiological and simulation results and their implications for understanding retinal mechanisms of visual information processing.