Do retinal ganglion cells project natural scenes to their principal subspace and whiten them?
Year: 2016
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Several theories of early sensory processing suggest that it whitens sensory stimuli. Here, we test three key predictions of the whitening theory using recordings from 152 ganglion cells in salamander retina responding to natural movies. We confirm the previous finding that firing rates of ganglion cells are less correlated compared to natural scenes, although significant correlations remain. We show that while the power spectrum of ganglion cells decays less steeply than that of natural scenes, it is not completely flattened. Finally, we find evidence that only the top principal components of the visual stimulus are transmitted.
Authors: Reza Abbasi-Asl, Cengiz Pehlevan, Bin Yu, Dmitri Chklovskii
Institutions: Flatiron Institute, University of California, Berkeley
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2592738714