Spatial and temporal organization in retinal units

Cross‐correlation analysis of the maintained discharge of rabbit retinal ganglion cells.

“…Direct observation of correlated discharge for three retinal ganglion cell pairs in the cat retina was reported by Rodieck (1967) in which each of the three cell pairs consisted of an ON-centre cell with an OFF-centre cell. However, Gestri, Maffei & Petracchi (1966) found no correlation between twenty-two simultaneously recorded cat retinal ganglion cells, and Schellart & Spekreijse (1973) came to the same conclusion for goldfish retinal ganglion cells. In contrast, Arnett (1978) has recently reported statistical dependencies between spontaneously discharging goldfish retinal ganglion cells.…”

A model for the variability of interspike intervals during sustained firing of a retinal neuron

“…Similarly, some neurons seem to share with goldfish ganglion cells the feature that C is constant over a considerable range of maintained stimulation (e.g. Gestri et al, 1966;Mastebroek et al, 1977), while others do not (e.g. Goldberg et al, 1964;Werner and Mountcastle, 1963).…”

Spatio‐temporal interactions in cat retinal ganglion cells showing linear spatial summation.

“…This kind of analysis has often been justified by supposing that the nervous system will usually have available an ensemble of similar signals which can be combined together before being low-pass filtered to provide a representation of an input common to the nerve cells from which the ensemble of signals originates. While it was believed that the occurence of impulses in different ganglion cells was uncorrelated and that the statistics of ganglion cell discharges were rather precisely correlated with the mean rate (both findings of a study by Gestri, Maffei & Petracchi in 1966) there was little reason to doubt that discharge rate in individual optic nerve fibres was the relevant variable. However, it is now clear that the discharges in X cells with overlapping receptive fields can be highly correlated (Mastronarde, 1983) Enroth-Cugell & Robson (1966) and to the sensitivity functions measured by Derrington & Lennie (1982) under similar conditions.…”