A public confession: the retina trumpets its failed predictions.
To compensate for delays of phototransduction, the retina anticipates the future by extrapolating the position of a moving object. But what if the object's motion changes, and the extrapolation is wrong? In this issue of Neuron, Schwartz and colleagues show that these prediction failures trigger a large burst of firing that helps to rapidly correct the neural representation of the object's new position.
Holy
Timothy E
TE
Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA. holy@wustl.edu
D000557:Ambystoma; D000818:Animals; D004594:Electrophysiology; D017950:Ganglia, Sensory / Q000502:physiology; D051379:Mice; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D012160:Retina / Q000502:physiology*; D014785:Vision, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*