Mathematical principles in afferent visual neurons: Differentiation, integration and transient proportionality related to receptive fields and shift-effect
✍ Scribed by Burkhart Fischer; Jürgen Krüger
- Publisher
- Springer
- Year
- 1976
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 814 KB
- Volume
- 38
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1522-9602
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✦ Synopsis
The dual reciprocal and antagonistic organization of B-and D-neurons of the afferent visual system is obtained using differentiation and integration as mathematical equivalents of visual information processing by an impulse frequency code. The spatial and temporal derivatives lead to the transient responses. A constant and a time-dependent term proportional to the luminance distribution describe the sustained response components and the shift-effect of retinal on-and off-center ganglion cells. Receptive-field properties of lateral genieulate cells and their antagonistic shift-effect are obtained by passing the retinal output, i.e. the difference between B-and D-neurons' activity, once again through the same operations. However, the factor Of proportionality is applied to the retina alone. The surprisingly small difference between retinal and geniculate receptive field properties on the one hand and the dramatic change from a synergistic to an antagonistic shifteffect on the other hand are thereby explained. The theory offers an understanding of a a possible functional significance of the shift-effect as a mechanism of transient restoration of visual information, which prevents the system from total fading by means of shifts of the retinal image, normally produced by eye movements.