On the potential role of lateral connectivity in retinal anticipation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how lateral connectivity in the retina, involving amacrine cells and gap junctions, can enhance motion anticipation, supported by theoretical analysis and simulations of retinal responses to visual stimuli.

Contribution

It demonstrates that lateral connectivity can trigger activity waves that improve motion anticipation, providing a new understanding of retinal processing mechanisms.

Findings

Lateral connectivity can induce activity waves enhancing anticipation.

Direction sensitivity can be inherited from gap junction asymmetry.

Model responses successfully predict retinal anticipation of 2D stimuli.

Abstract

We analyse the potential effects of lateral connectivity (amacrine cells and gap junctions) on motion anticipation in the retina. Our main result is that lateral connectivity can-under conditions analysed in the paper-trigger a wave of activity enhancing the anticipation mechanism provided by local gain control [8, 17]. We illustrate these predictions by two examples studied in the experimental literature: differential motion sensitive cells [1] and direction sensitive cells where direction sensitivity is inherited from asymmetry in gap junctions connectivity [73]. We finally present reconstructions of retinal responses to 2D visual inputs to assess the ability of our model to anticipate motion in the case of three different 2D stimuli.