Spikes with short inter-spike intervals in frog retinal ganglion cells are more correlated with their adjacent neurons’ activities

Liu, Wenzhong; Yan, Ru-Jia; Wei, Jing; Gong, Hui; Liang, Pei-Ji

doi:10.1007/s13238-011-1091-5

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 31 publications

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“…The alterable and dynamic synchronization of neuron groups empowers the neurons to have an extended information coding capacity to indentify the difference between the stimulation patterns. These are consistent with the notion that correlation among neuron population activities improves the neural coding efficiency and information transmission (Pillow et al 2008;Koch et al 2004;Schnitzer and Meister 2003;Liu et al 2011).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Visual pattern discrimination by population retinal ganglion cells’ activities during natural movie stimulation

et al. 2013

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In the visual system, neurons often fire in synchrony, and it is believed that synchronous activities of group neurons are more efficient than single cell response in transmitting neural signals to down-stream neurons. However, whether dynamic natural stimuli are encoded by dynamic spatiotemporal firing patterns of synchronous group neurons still needs to be investigated. In this paper we recorded the activities of population ganglion cells in bullfrog retina in response to time-varying natural images (natural scene movie) using multi-electrode arrays. In response to some different brief section pairs of the movie, synchronous groups of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) fired with similar but different spike events. We attempted to discriminate the movie sections based on temporal firing patterns of single cells and spatiotemporal firing patterns of the synchronous groups of RGCs characterized by a measurement of subsequence distribution discrepancy. The discrimination performance was assessed by a classification method based on Support Vector Machines. Our results show that different movie sections of the natural movie elicited reliable dynamic spatiotemporal activity patterns of the synchronous RGCs, which are more efficient in discriminating different movie sections than the temporal patterns of the single cells' spike events. These results suggest that, during natural vision, the down-stream neurons may decode the visual information from the dynamic spatiotemporal patterns of the synchronous group of RGCs' activities.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Visual pattern discrimination by population retinal ganglion cells’ activities during natural movie stimulation

et al. 2013

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Gap junction permeability modulated by dopamine exerts effects on spatial and temporal correlation of retinal ganglion cells’ firing activities

Gong

et al. 2013

J Comput Neurosci

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Synchronized activities among retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) via gap junctions can be increased by exogenous dopamine (DA). During DA application, single neurons' firing activities become more synchronized with its adjacent neighbors. One intriguing question is how the enhanced spatial synchronization alters the temporal firing structure of single neurons. In the present study, firing activities of bullfrog's dimming detectors in response to binary pseudo-random checker-board flickering were recorded via a multi-channel recording system. DA was applied in the retina to modulate synchronized activities between RGCs, and the effect of DA on firing activities of single neurons was examined. It was found that, during application of DA, synchronized activities between single neuron and its neighboring neurons was enhanced. At the meantime, the temporal structures of single neuron spike train changed significantly, and the temporal correlation in single neuron's response decreased. The pharmacological study results indicated that the activation of D1 receptor might have effects on gap junction permeability between RGCs. Our results suggested that the dopaminergic pathway participated in the modulation of spatial and temporal correlation of RGCs' firing activities, and may exert critical effects on visual information processing in the retina.

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Stimulus discrimination via responses of retinal ganglion cells and dopamine-dependent modulation

Liang

2013

Neurosci. Bull.

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Neighboring retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) fi re with a high degree of correlation. It has been increasingly realized that visual perception of the environment relies on neuronal population activity to encode and transmit the information contained in stimuli. Understanding how neuronal population activity contributes to visual information processing is essential for understanding the mechanisms of visual coding. Here we simultaneously recorded spike discharges from groups of RGCs in bullfrog retina in response to visual patterns (checkerboard, horizontal grating, and full-fi eld illumination) using a multi-electrode array system. To determine the role of synchronous activity mediated by gap junctions, we measured the correct classifi cation rates of single cells' firing patterns as well as the synchronization patterns of multiple neurons. We found that, under normal conditions, RGC population activity exhibited distinct response features with exposure to different stimulus patterns and had a higher rate of correct stimulus discrimination than the activity of single cells. Dopamine (1 μmol/L) application did not signifi cantly change the performance of single neuron activity, but enhanced the synchronization of the RGC population activity and decreased the rate of correct stimulus pattern discrimination. These findings suggest that the synchronous activity of RGCs plays an important role in the information coding of different types of visual patterns, and a dopamine-induced increase in synchronous activity weakens the population performance in pattern discrimination, indicating the potential role of the dopaminergic pathway in modulating the population coding process.

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Spikes with short inter-spike intervals in frog retinal ganglion cells are more correlated with their adjacent neurons’ activities

Cited by 5 publications

References 31 publications

Visual pattern discrimination by population retinal ganglion cells’ activities during natural movie stimulation

Visual pattern discrimination by population retinal ganglion cells’ activities during natural movie stimulation

Gap junction permeability modulated by dopamine exerts effects on spatial and temporal correlation of retinal ganglion cells’ firing activities

Stimulus discrimination via responses of retinal ganglion cells and dopamine-dependent modulation

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