Abstract
Presentation Description :
All information about the color, form, and motion of objects in the environment is conveyed to the brain through the spike patterns of retinal ganglion cells. More than 20 distinct ganglion cell types have been identified anatomically in vertebrates and each type conveys different information about the visual scene and relays that information to the brain. Work in mice and other non-primates has identified ganglion cells that respond selectively to specific visual features. Notable examples include cells that are selective for the motion of an object relative to the background, self-generated motion, object orientation, and motion direction (Barlow et al., 1964; Jacoby and Schwartz, 2017; Nath and Schwartz, 2016; Olveczky et al., 2003; Tien et al., 2015). This work suggests a clear role for ganglion cell diversity – the parallel neural circuits in the retina extract distinct information from the environment and convey these signals, through specific ganglion cell types, to downstream brain regions (Gollisch and Meister, 2010).
Several bipolar cell and amacrine cell types appear to be strongly conserved across mammals, including primates (Puller et al., 2011; Puthussery et al., 2013; Stafford and Dacey, 1997). In non-primates, this diversity of bipolar and amacrine cell types appears to be an important component of the functional diversity in ganglion cell signaling, but previous work in primates has not demonstrated the functional diversity that is found in other mammals (Field et al., 2010; Kaplan and Shapley, 1986; Kaplan et al., 1988; Shapley et al., 1991). This is often interpreted as evidence that the primate retina functions as a relatively simple front-end spatiotemporal filter for visual processing, while more complex, behaviorally-relevant feature extraction occurs in the visual cortex (Lennie and Movshon, 2005; Rust et al., 2005). Thus, the retina is thought by many to perform a fundamentally different role in visual processing in primates than in other mammals (Crook et al., 1988; Enroth-Cugell and Robson, 1966; Kaplan and Shapley, 1986; Lee et al., 1994; Shapley and Lennie, 1985). Our recent work on understudied ganglion cells has revealed an unexpected diversity in computations in the primate retina including object-motion selectivity and orientation selectivity, supporting a computational repertoire that is more similar to non-primates than previously appreciated.
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.