Abstract
In this method article, we show how to estimate of the number of retinal ganglion cells (RGC), and the number of lateral genicular nucleus (LGN) and primary visual cortex (V1) neurons involved in visual orientation discrimination tasks. We reported the results of this calculation in Kanitscheider et al. (2015), where we were interested in comparing the number of neurons in the visual periphery versus visual cortex for a specific experiment. This calculation allows estimation of the information content at different stages of the visual pathway, which can be used to assess the efficiency of the computations performed. As these numbers are generally not readily available but may be useful to other researchers, we explain here in detail how we obtained them. The calculation is straightforward, and simply requires combining anatomical and physiological information about the macaque visual pathway. Similar information could be used to repeat the calculation for other species or modalities.
Highlights
We would like to estimate: 1) the number of retinal ganglion cells (RGC) and lateral genicular nucleus (LGN) neurons activated by a given visual stimulus; and 2) the number of V1 neurons that are activated by the same stimulus and are relevant to compute orientation.We define as relevant those neurons that project to higher cortex, and separately consider the additional requirement that the neurons are tuned for orientation
We would like to estimate: 1) the number of RGC and LGN neurons activated by a given visual stimulus; and 2) the number of V1 neurons that are activated by the same stimulus and are relevant to compute orientation
Upper bound on the number of cortical neurons First, the number of neurons activated by a visual stimulus depends on the size and position of the image in the visual field
Summary
We would like to estimate: 1) the number of RGC and LGN neurons activated by a given visual stimulus; and 2) the number of V1 neurons that are activated by the same stimulus and are relevant to compute orientation. We define as relevant those neurons that project to higher cortex, and separately consider the additional requirement that the neurons are tuned for orientation
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