Long-distance intraretinal connections in birds

Abstract

Electrophysiological experiments have shown in both birds and mammals that remote parts of the retina, several millimetres apart, interact at the retinal level^1,2. The anatomical basis of this is poorly understood, although in mammals some cells in the ganglion cell layer have axons that terminate in the inner plexiform layer several millimetres from the cell body^3,4. In birds, the longest previously reported intraretinal connections were from amacrine cells, extending only a few hundred microns⁵. But we here describe very long connections that span almost the entire extent of the retina in chicks and chick embryos. The parent cell bodies are in the inner nuclear layer of the ventral half of the retina, and they project in topographical order onto the dorsal half. They do not project to the brain. They may be involved in selective switching of attention between the upper and lower parts of the visual field, at an unprecedentedly early stage of visual processing.