Information Synergy in the Anticipatory Dynamics of a Retina

TL;DR

This study investigates how retinas encode light intensity and its derivative to anticipate stimuli, revealing that synergistic information processing in retinas can explain visual illusions and anticipatory perception.

Contribution

It demonstrates that retinal encoding involves synergistic information from intensity and its derivative, providing a new understanding of anticipation in visual perception.

Findings

Retinal spike rate encodes a combination of light intensity and its derivative.

Synergistic information enables the retina to anticipate stimuli.

Illusions may arise from recombined information in retinal networks.

Abstract

Visual perceptions often come with illusions whose physical origin are not well understood yet. The encoding of stochastic light intensity $x(t)$ into spikes with firing rate $r(t)$ at time $t$ is investigated in an experiment with retinas from bullfrogs to understand the mechanism of anticipation. Partial information decomposition of the mutual information between $r$ and the combined state $\{x,\dot x\}$ is found to be consistent with the encoding form: $r(t) \sim (1-\lambda)x(t) + \lambda \dot x(t) \tau_0$ with $\lambda$ being a system dependent parameter and $\tau_0$ a constant. This form of $r(t)$ indicates that a retina is capable of anticipation based on the synergistic information generation between $x$ and $\dot x$. Our results suggest that illusions such as the anticipation studied here during retinal perception can originate from the recombination of information extracted in the retinal network.