Synchronized Activities among Retinal Ganglion Cells in Response to External Stimuli

  • Lei Xiao
  • Ying-Ying Zhang
  • Pei-Ji Liang
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 6063)

Abstract

Synchronized firing is an efficient way for retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) to encode visual stimuli. In the present study, we studied synchronized activities among RGCs in response to natural movie and pseudo-random checker-board flickering. The results showed that nearby RGCs tended to fire synchronously much more frequently than expected by chance, in response to both stimuli. Under our experimental conditions, synchronous groups could contain three or more cells in response to natural movie; but activities were more often observed between pair-wise cells in response to checker-board flickering. The correlation index calculated between neuron pairs did not have any significant tendency of increase or decrease when natural movie stimulation was lasted; however, it tended to increase when pseudo-random checker-board flickering stimulation was lasted.

Keywords

Synchronized activities correlation index dynamical retinal ganglion cells 

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  • Lei Xiao
    • 1
  • Ying-Ying Zhang
    • 1
  • Pei-Ji Liang
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Biomedical EngineeringShanghai Jiao Tong UniversityShanghaiChina

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