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Visual pattern discrimination by population retinal ganglion cells’ activities during natural movie stimulation

Cognitive Neurodynamics volume 8, pages 27–35 (2014)Cite this article

Abstract

In the visual system, neurons often fire in synchrony, and it is believed that synchronous activities of group neurons are more efficient than single cell response in transmitting neural signals to down-stream neurons. However, whether dynamic natural stimuli are encoded by dynamic spatiotemporal firing patterns of synchronous group neurons still needs to be investigated. In this paper we recorded the activities of population ganglion cells in bullfrog retina in response to time-varying natural images (natural scene movie) using multi-electrode arrays. In response to some different brief section pairs of the movie, synchronous groups of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) fired with similar but different spike events. We attempted to discriminate the movie sections based on temporal firing patterns of single cells and spatiotemporal firing patterns of the synchronous groups of RGCs characterized by a measurement of subsequence distribution discrepancy. The discrimination performance was assessed by a classification method based on Support Vector Machines. Our results show that different movie sections of the natural movie elicited reliable dynamic spatiotemporal activity patterns of the synchronous RGCs, which are more efficient in discriminating different movie sections than the temporal patterns of the single cells’ spike events. These results suggest that, during natural vision, the down-stream neurons may decode the visual information from the dynamic spatiotemporal patterns of the synchronous group of RGCs’ activities.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the grant from National Foundation of Natural Science of China (No. 11232005 and No. 61075108). The authors thank Xin-Wei Gong and Hao Li from School of Biomedical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University for important technical contributions and informative discussions.

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Affiliations

  1. Institute for Cognitive Neurodynamics, East China University Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, China

    Ying-Ying Zhang, Ru-Bin Wang & Xiao-Chuan Pan

  2. School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Hai-Qing Gong & Pei-Ji Liang

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  1. Ying-Ying Zhang
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  2. Ru-Bin Wang
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  3. Xiao-Chuan Pan
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  4. Hai-Qing Gong
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  5. Pei-Ji Liang
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Correspondence to Pei-Ji Liang.

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Zhang, YY., Wang, RB., Pan, XC. et al. Visual pattern discrimination by population retinal ganglion cells’ activities during natural movie stimulation. Cogn Neurodyn 8, 27–35 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-013-9266-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-013-9266-9

Keywords

  • Multi-unit recording
  • Brief movie sections
  • Population RGCs
  • MSDD