1. Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
2. †Present addresses: RIKEN Brain Science Institute, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako-shi, Saitama 351-0198, Japan (T.H.); Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA (S.A.B.)

Correspondence to: Markus Meister¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to M.M. (Email: meister@fas.harvard.edu).

Abstract

Retinal ganglion cells convey the visual image from the eye to the brain. They generally encode local differences in space and changes in time rather than the raw image intensity. This can be seen as a strategy of predictive coding, adapted through evolution to the average image statistics of the natural environment. Yet animals encounter many environments with visual statistics different from the average scene. Here we show that when this happens, the retina adjusts its processing dynamically. The spatio-temporal receptive fields of retinal ganglion cells change after a few seconds in a new environment. The changes are adaptive, in that the new receptive field improves predictive coding under the new image statistics. We show that a network model with plastic synapses can account for the large variety of observed adaptations.

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