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Do retinal ganglion cells act as independent encoders?

Sheila Nirenberg

UCLA

Correlated firing among neurons is a widespread phenomenon in the visual system. Neighboring neurons, in areas from retina to cortex, tend to fire together more often than would be expected by chance. The role of this correlated firing in encoding visual information is unclear and controversial. Here we examined its role in the retina. We presented the retina with natural stimuli and recorded the responses of its output cells, the ganglion cells. We then used a novel approach to measure the amount of information about the stimuli that could be obtained from the cells under two conditions: 1) when their correlated firing was taken into account, and 2) when their correlated firing was ignored. We found that greater than 90% of the information about the stimuli could be obtained from the cells when their correlated firing was ignored. This indicates that the ganglion cells act largely independently to encode information, which greatly simplifies the problem of decoding their activity.