Sensitivity to image recurrence across eye-movement-like image transitions through local serial inhibition in the retina

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Abstract

Standard models of stimulus encoding in the retina postulate that image presentations activate neurons according to the increase of preferred contrast inside the receptive field. During natural vision, however, images do not arrive in isolation, but follow each other rapidly, separated by sudden gaze shifts. We here report that, contrary to standard models, specific ganglion cells in mouse retina are suppressed after a rapid image transition by changes in visual patterns across the transition, but respond with a distinct spike burst when the same pattern reappears. This sensitivity to image recurrence depends on opposing effects of glycinergic and GABAergic inhibition and can be explained by a circuit of local serial inhibition. Rapid image transitions thus trigger a mode of operation that differs from the processing of simpler stimuli and allows the retina to tag particular image parts or to detect transition types that lead to recurring stimulus patterns.

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Vidhyasankar Krishnamoorthy

Department of Ophthalmology, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Michael Weick

Department of Ophthalmology, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Tim Gollisch

Department of Ophthalmology, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

For correspondence
tim.gollisch@med.uni-goettingen.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-3998-533X

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Collaborative Research Center 889,project C1)

Tim Gollisch

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (GO 1408/2-1)

Tim Gollisch

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: All experimental procedures were performed in accordance with national and institutional guidelines and approved by the institutional animal care committee of the University Medical Center Goettingen (protocol number T11/35).

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.