Retinal lateral inhibition revisited

Abstract

Retinal lateral inhibition has long been known as the ‘contrast encoder’ and the relationship among retinal processing, lateral inhibition, and contrast perception has been discussed in the conventional scheme of difference-of-Gaussian (DoG). However, many studies argued that the classic DoG RF failed to explain contrast perception phenomena involving large spatial scale surface interaction (~1 deg). On the other hand, we recently showed that one of the neglected retinal features, wide-RF of retinal interneurons, explains how the visual system performs long-range interaction (Kim & Bertalmio, 2015). The long-range effect was previously explained by the multiscale DoG model (Blakeslee & McCourt, 1997) that proposes a varying spatial-frequency-bandwidth-channel processing. Here we show that the the retinal hierarchical center-surround processing architecture combined with interneurons of narrow and wide RFs accomplishes multi-channel-like results. We propose an update to the conventional view on lateral inhibition.