Inter-mosaic coordination of retinal receptive fields

The output of the retina is organized into many detector grids, called 'mosaics', that signal different features of visual scenes to the brain(1-4). Each mosaic comprises a single type of retinal ganglion cell (RGC), whose receptive fields tile visual space. Many mosaics arise as pairs, signalling increments (ON) and decrements (OFF), respectively, of a particular visual feature(5). Here we use a model of efficient coding(6) to determine how such mosaic pairs should be arranged to optimize the encoding of natural scenes. We find that information is maximized when these mosaic pairs are anti-aligned, meaning that the distances between the receptive field centres across mosaics are greater than expected by chance. We tested this prediction across multiple receptive field mosaics acquired using large-scale measurements of the light responses of rat and primate RGCs. ON and OFF RGC pairs with similar feature selectivity had anti-aligned receptive field mosaics, consistent with this prediction. ON and OFF RGC types that encode distinct features have independent mosaics. These results extend efficient coding theory beyond individual cells to predict how populations of diverse types of RGC are spatially arranged.

Automated summary

The study found that the output of the retina is organized into detector grids that signal different visual features to the brain, and using an efficient coding model, it was determined that anti-aligned mosaic pairs optimize the encoding of natural scenes. ON and OFF RGC pairs with similar feature selectivity had anti-aligned receptive field mosaics, while RGC types encoding distinct features had independent mosaics, extending efficient coding theory to predict the spatial arrangement of diverse RGC populations.