The role the retina plays in shaping predictive information in ganglion cell populations

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event The role the retina plays in shaping predictive information in ganglion cell populations Stephanie E. Palmer1*, Michael J. Berry1 and William Bialek1 1 Princeton University, United States We have examined how groups of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) encode predictive information in their collective firing patterns. Predictive information is defined here as the mutual information between firing patterns across several cells in the retina at a particular time, and the firing patterns of the same neurons at a time dt in the future. Put simply, we are asking how well the firing of the retina ‘now’ specifies the firing of the retina in the future. We find substantial predictive information in groups of retinal ganglion cells that grows with the number of neurons pooled. This predictive information is due, in part, to the intrinsic firing properties of the ganglion cells, as well as to correlations in the stimulus. We attempt to disentangle these effects by examining responses to temporally uncorrelated while noise stimuli. We find that roughly half of the predictive information we observe can be accounted for by intrinsic properties of RGCs, while the remaining half is induced by stimulus correlations. To assess what collective properties of ganglion cell firing account for the observed predictive information, we break correlations between cells and within cells in time. We find that the predictive information in groups of ganglion cells outstretches the summed contribution from individual cells’ predictive capacities, leading to substantial synergy in larger groups of RGCs. We also assess whether the way in which the retina encodes stimulus information is optimized for prediction. Preliminary evidence suggests that the retina does indeed compress information about past stimuli such that information about the future is maximally preserved. Conference: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, 25 Feb - 2 Mar, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster session II Citation: Palmer SE, Berry MJ and Bialek W (2010). The role the retina plays in shaping predictive information in ganglion cell populations. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.03.00289 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 05 Mar 2010; Published Online: 05 Mar 2010. * Correspondence: Stephanie E Palmer, Princeton University, Princeton, United States, sepalmer@princeton.edu Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Stephanie E Palmer Michael J Berry William Bialek Google Stephanie E Palmer Michael J Berry William Bialek Google Scholar Stephanie E Palmer Michael J Berry William Bialek PubMed Stephanie E Palmer Michael J Berry William Bialek Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.