TY - JOUR
T1 - Distributed feature representations of natural stimuli across parallel retinal pathways
AU - Hsiang, Jen Chun
AU - Shen, Ning
AU - Soto, Florentina
AU - Kerschensteiner, Daniel
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.
PY - 2024/12
Y1 - 2024/12
N2 - How sensory systems extract salient features from natural environments and organize them across neural pathways is unclear. Combining single-cell and population two-photon calcium imaging in mice, we discover that retinal ON bipolar cells (second-order neurons of the visual system) are divided into two blocks of four types. The two blocks distribute temporal and spatial information encoding, respectively. ON bipolar cell axons co-stratify within each block, but separate laminarly between them (upper block: diverse temporal, uniform spatial tuning; lower block: diverse spatial, uniform temporal tuning). ON bipolar cells extract temporal and spatial features similarly from artificial and naturalistic stimuli. In addition, they differ in sensitivity to coherent motion in naturalistic movies. Motion information is distributed across ON bipolar cells in the upper and the lower blocks, multiplexed with temporal and spatial contrast, independent features of natural scenes. Comparing the responses of different boutons within the same arbor, we find that axons of all ON bipolar cell types function as computational units. Thus, our results provide insights into the visual feature extraction from naturalistic stimuli and reveal how structural and functional organization cooperate to generate parallel ON pathways for temporal and spatial information in the mammalian retina.
AB - How sensory systems extract salient features from natural environments and organize them across neural pathways is unclear. Combining single-cell and population two-photon calcium imaging in mice, we discover that retinal ON bipolar cells (second-order neurons of the visual system) are divided into two blocks of four types. The two blocks distribute temporal and spatial information encoding, respectively. ON bipolar cell axons co-stratify within each block, but separate laminarly between them (upper block: diverse temporal, uniform spatial tuning; lower block: diverse spatial, uniform temporal tuning). ON bipolar cells extract temporal and spatial features similarly from artificial and naturalistic stimuli. In addition, they differ in sensitivity to coherent motion in naturalistic movies. Motion information is distributed across ON bipolar cells in the upper and the lower blocks, multiplexed with temporal and spatial contrast, independent features of natural scenes. Comparing the responses of different boutons within the same arbor, we find that axons of all ON bipolar cell types function as computational units. Thus, our results provide insights into the visual feature extraction from naturalistic stimuli and reveal how structural and functional organization cooperate to generate parallel ON pathways for temporal and spatial information in the mammalian retina.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85186609577&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/s41467-024-46348-y
DO - 10.1038/s41467-024-46348-y
M3 - Article
C2 - 38429280
AN - SCOPUS:85186609577
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 15
JO - Nature communications
JF - Nature communications
IS - 1
M1 - 1920
ER -