PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Stephane Deny
AU  - Ulisse Ferrari
AU  - Emilie Mace
AU  - Pierre Yger
AU  - Romain Caplette
AU  - Serge Picaud
AU  - Gašper Tkačik
AU  - Olivier Marre
TI  - Multiplexed computations in retinal ganglion cells of a single type
AID  - 10.1101/080135
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 080135
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/10/080135.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/10/080135.full
AB  - In the early visual system, cells of the same type perform the same computation in di↵erent places of the visual field. How these cells code together a complex visual scene is unclear. A common assumption is that cells of the same type will extract a single stimulus feature to form a feature map, but this has rarely been observed directly. Using large-scale recordings in the rat retina, we show that a homogeneous population of fast OFF ganglion cells simultaneously encodes two radically different features of a visual scene. Cells close to a moving object code linearly for its position, while distant cells remain largely invariant to the object’s position and, instead, respond non-linearly to changes in the object’s speed. Cells switch between these two computations depending on the stimulus. We developed a quantitative model that accounts for this effect and identified a likely disinhibitory circuit that mediates it. Ganglion cells of a single type thus do not code for one, but two features simultaneously. This richer, flexible neural map might also be present in other sensory systems.