Description

Cellular level models of neural circuits provide an understanding of the complex neurological phenomena, such as vision. Encoding visual inputs in the visual system of an animal depends on the cellular level properties as well as cell distribution and interconnections in multiple stages. The Retina provides the sensory inputs to the deeper parts of the visual system. Turtle retina is different from humans in cell types and the distribution. The turtle retina has cells which are sensitive to motion direction in addition light intensity. The cells are distributed in such a way that highest cell density occurs along a line called the visual streak. However, it shares many features with human and primate retina. Moreover, its neurological structure is simple enough to be modeled at a cellular level. In this talk I wish to present the work on developing a model retinal patch of a turtle retina and an analysis of encodability/decodability on the model retinal patch. The individual cells are modeled using a two stage hybrid model. The first stage is a cascade of filters and the second stage is a spiking cell model. These model cells are distributed on the model retinal patch according to the actual cell distributions. The encodability and decodability analysis is conducted assuming the population response is a stochastic process.