Temporal and Spatial Characters of Retinal Ganglion Cells' Response to Natural Stimuli

Results from physiological, theoretical, and computational studies suggest that the visual cortex processes natural sensory information with a strategy of sparse coding. To investigate whether this is also the case for retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), neuronal activities were recorded from a group of chicken RGCs in response to natural, time-varying images (movies) using extracellular multi-electrode recording system. The response of single RGC in exposure to natural stimulation showed sparse activity, while the ensemble responses did not. Such result may suggest that at the RGC level, the single unit activity is kept at a low level in response to natural stimuli for energy-saving, but the neuonal population are often activated in a correlated manner to achieve efficient information transmission.