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Decorrelation and efficient coding by retinal ganglion cells

Nature Neuroscience volume 15, pages 628–635 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

An influential theory of visual processing asserts that retinal center-surround receptive fields remove spatial correlations in the visual world, producing ganglion cell spike trains that are less redundant than the corresponding image pixels. For bright, high-contrast images, this decorrelation would enhance coding efficiency in optic nerve fibers of limited capacity. We tested the central prediction of the theory and found that the spike trains of retinal ganglion cells were indeed decorrelated compared with the visual input. However, most of the decorrelation was accomplished not by the receptive fields, but by nonlinear processing in the retina. We found that a steep response threshold enhanced efficient coding by noisy spike trains and that the effect of this nonlinearity was near optimal in both salamander and macaque retina. These results offer an explanation for the sparseness of retinal spike trains and highlight the importance of treating the full nonlinear character of neural codes.

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Figure 1: Decorrelation of naturalistic stimuli.
Figure 2: Nonlinearity accounts for much of decorrelation.
Figure 3: Sparseness in retinal responses.
Figure 4: Decorrelation and efficient coding in the LNP model.
Figure 5: Efficiency of stimulus coding by RGCs.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the members of the Meister laboratory, M. Berry, T. Toyozumi and J.-P. Nadal for helpful advice. This work was funded by grants from the US National Institutes of Health to M.M.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA

    Xaq Pitkow

  2. Molecular and Cellular Biology, Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Markus Meister

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  1. Xaq Pitkow
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X.P. and M.M. designed the study. X.P. performed all of the experiments, analysis and modeling. X.P. and M.M. wrote the article.

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Correspondence to Markus Meister.

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Pitkow, X., Meister, M. Decorrelation and efficient coding by retinal ganglion cells. Nat Neurosci 15, 628–635 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3064

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