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The retinal hypercircuit: a repeating synaptic interactive motif underlying visual function
Author(s) -
Werblin Frank S.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
the journal of physiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.802
H-Index - 240
eISSN - 1469-7793
pISSN - 0022-3751
DOI - 10.1113/jphysiol.2011.210617
Subject(s) - neuroscience , looming , retina , inner plexiform layer , retinal , visual processing , biology , computer science , perception , physics , optics , biochemistry
The vertebrate retina generates a stack of about a dozen different movies that represent the visual world as dynamic neural images. The stack is embodied as separate strata that span the inner plexiform layer (IPL). At each stratum, ganglion cell dendrites reach up to read out inhibitory interactions between three different amacrine cell classes that shape bipolar‐to‐ganglion cell transmission. The nexus of these five cell classes represents a functional module, a retinal ‘hypercircuit’, that is repeated across the surface of each of the dozen strata that span the depth of the IPL. Individual differences in the characteristics of each cell class at each stratum lead to the unique processing characteristics of each neural image throughout the stack. This review shows how the interactions between different morphological and physiological cell classes generate many of the known retinal visual functions including motion detection, directional selectivity, local edge detection, looming detection, object motion and saccadic suppression.