Nonlinear measurement and classification of receptive fields in cat retinal ganglion cells.
Originally, modeling of ganglion-cell responses in cat was based mainly on linear analysis. This is satisfactory for those cells in which spatial summation of excitation is approximately linear (X-cells) but it fails for Y-cells, where summation has strong nonlinear components. Others have shown the utility of using sinusoidal analysis to study harmonic and intermodulation nonlinearities in the temporal frequency domain. We have used Wiener-kernel analysis to obtain directly both temporal and spatial impulse responses and their nonlinear interactions. From these, we were able to predict accurately the responses that a counterphase modulated grating elicited in both X-cells and Y-cells. In addition, we show that the first-order responses can measure the two-dimensional spatial features of the receptive field with high resolution. Thus, nonlinear analysis of responses to white-noise stimuli may be sufficient to both classify and measure the receptive fields of many different types of ganglion cells.
Citron
M C
MC
Department of Neurology, Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, CA 90054.
Emerson
R C
RC
Levick
W R
WR
D000818:Animals; D002415:Cats; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009622:Noise; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012160:Retina / Q000502:physiology*; D012165:Retinal Ganglion Cells / Q000145:classification / Q000502:physiology*; D014794:Visual Fields