TY - JOUR TI - Adaptation in cone photoreceptors contributes to an unexpected insensitivity of primate On parasol retinal ganglion cells to spatial structure in natural images AU - Yu, Zhou AU - Turner, Maxwell H AU - Baudin, Jacob AU - Rieke, Fred A2 - Feller, Marla B A2 - Moore, Tirin A2 - Baden, Tom A2 - Gollisch, Tim VL - 11 PY - 2022 DA - 2022/03/14 SP - e70611 C1 - eLife 2022;11:e70611 DO - 10.7554/eLife.70611 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.70611 AB - Neural circuits are constructed from nonlinear building blocks, and not surprisingly overall circuit behavior is often strongly nonlinear. But neural circuits can also behave near linearly, and some circuits shift from linear to nonlinear behavior depending on stimulus conditions. Such control of nonlinear circuit behavior is fundamental to neural computation. Here, we study a surprising stimulus dependence of the responses of macaque On (but not Off) parasol retinal ganglion cells: these cells respond nonlinearly to spatial structure in some stimuli but near linearly to spatial structure in others, including natural inputs. We show that these differences in the linearity of the integration of spatial inputs can be explained by a shift in the balance of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs that originates at least partially from adaptation in the cone photoreceptors. More generally, this highlights how subtle asymmetries in signaling – here in the cone signals – can qualitatively alter circuit computation. KW - visual processing KW - retina KW - natural images KW - neural coding JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -