TY - JOUR T1 - Multiplexed computations in retinal ganglion cells of a single type JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/080135 SP - 080135 AU - Stephane Deny AU - Ulisse Ferrari AU - Emilie Mace AU - Pierre Yger AU - Romain Caplette AU - Serge Picaud AU - Gašper Tkačik AU - Olivier Marre Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/10/080135.abstract N2 - 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. ER -