Horizontal cell signal is smaller with texture-like nonuniform patterns than with uniform fields of the same space-average illuminance

Abstract

While measurement of the pertinent response as a function of flash intensity has been a standard procedure in vision research, we ask here what happens to horizontal cells in the vertebrate retina if the flash energy is varied through the density of a large number of small light spots rather than through the intensity of uniform illumination. The experiment described here demonstrates that the electrical response of horizontal cells in the turtle retina is consistently smaller with the present dot-density modulation than with the usual intensity modulation, even though the comparison is made when the mean irradiance per photoreceptor is equal in the two methods of modulation. Thus, the spatial summation, an important retinal function often thought to provide a base signal level for contrast detection, is affected significantly by how the visual pattern is structured at a level of microscopic dimension far smaller than the receptive field. The present finding, which seems to be a new form of area-intensity effect, can be explained if the dendritic membrane conductance of horizontal cells at each synaptic site increases at a progressively higher rate with decreases of the corresponding local illuminance. This possibility is discussed in the light of relevant photoreceptor response data, the presumed sigmoidal trend of the postsynaptic chemosensitivity and a simple electrical analog of contiguous horizontal cells.