What information does the eye send to the brain? Recording the entire visual output at a single retinal location

Abstract

Purpose:: Right at the first synapse in the mammalian retina, the stream of incoming visual information is split into multiple parallel information channels, preprocessed in the retinal network and relayed to the brain via different types of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). About 20 different morphological RGC types have been described, with each RGC population tiling the retinal surface with its dendritic arbors. Here, we simultaneously record from all RGC types at one retinal location to obtain a complete sample of the information sent to the brain and to understand how the representation of spatio-temporal information in a local image patch is distributed across different RGC types. We aim to establish a more complete view of what visual information is preserved in the retina and how it is decomposed into the different channels.Methods:: Light-evoked Ca2+ activity is recorded at single-cell resolution from groups of RGCs …