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Nature 423, 401-408 (22 May 2003) | doi:10.1038/nature01652; Received 20 December 2002; Accepted 18 March 2003; Published online 11 May 2003

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Segregation of object and background motion in the retina

Bence P. Ölveczky1,2, Stephen A. Baccus3 & Markus Meister3

  1. Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  2. Program in Neuroscience, Harvard University, 220 Longwood Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
  3. Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

Correspondence to: Markus Meister3 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to M.M. (Email: meister@fas.harvard.edu).

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An important task in vision is to detect objects moving within a stationary scene. During normal viewing this is complicated by the presence of eye movements that continually scan the image across the retina, even during fixation. To detect moving objects, the brain must distinguish local motion within the scene from the global retinal image drift due to fixational eye movements. We have found that this process begins in the retina: a subset of retinal ganglion cells responds to motion in the receptive field centre, but only if the wider surround moves with a different trajectory. This selectivity for differential motion is independent of direction, and can be explained by a model of retinal circuitry that invokes pooling over nonlinear interneurons. The suppression by global image motion is probably mediated by polyaxonal, wide-field amacrine cells with transient responses. We show how a population of ganglion cells selective for differential motion can rapidly flag moving objects, and even segregate multiple moving objects.

  1. Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  2. Program in Neuroscience, Harvard University, 220 Longwood Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
  3. Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

Correspondence to: Markus Meister3 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to M.M. (Email: meister@fas.harvard.edu).