title: Concerted signaling by retinal ganglion cells.
abstract: To analyze the rules that govern communication between eye and brain, visual responses were recorded from an intact salamander retina. Parallel observation of many retinal ganglion cells with a microelectrode array showed that nearby neurons often fired synchronously, with spike delays of less than 10 milliseconds. The frequency of such synchronous spikes exceeded the correlation expected from a shared visual stimulus up to 20-fold. Synchronous firing persisted under a variety of visual stimuli and accounted for the majority of action potentials recorded. Analysis of receptive fields showed that concerted spikes encoded information not carried by individual cells; they may represent symbols in a multineuronal code for vision.
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Meister
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lagnado
authors.forename: D A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Baylor
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials; D000818:Animals; D066298:In Vitro Techniques; D008839:Microelectrodes; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012165:Retinal Ganglion Cells / Q000502:physiology*; D015398:Signal Transduction; D014562:Caudata; D014785:Vision, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*