Weakness of surround inhibition with natural-image stimulation

• DOI: 10.1167/6.13.43
• Publication Date: 2010-06-04T12:11:28Z
• Authors: X. Cao; D. K. Merwine; N. M. Grzywacz
• Keywords: Lateral inhibition

Understanding responses of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) to natural images is interest in vision research. RGCs' properties may be different when mapped with versus artificial stimuli. For instance, annuli homogeneous intensity, surround inhibition receptive fields (RFs) can reduce by more than 50% (1). Will produce as much stimulated images? We attempted answer this question recording rabbit RGCs a large sample images. used three methods estimate the level inhibition: First, we estimated linear approximations RFs reversed correlation and calculation methods, including pseudo-inverse, two kinds regularized project pursuit regression (PPR) (2, 3, 4). Second, Volterra-kernel expansion RFs, using PPR for dimensionality reduction(5). Third, segmented into concentric center regions, studied function mean contrast surround. In method, appeared statistical analysis trend that showed falling (6, 7). All these was weak example, median fell typically only 10 20% over range contrast. Inhibition weak, since have low contrasts relatively high spatial-frequency components. Functionally, make sense; although strong helps detecting edges, it eliminate intensity information from inside objects.