Presentation:

LGN Presentation

Take Home Messages:

LGN:
1. Lateral geniculate nucleus transmits information from retina to cortex.
2. It is not known what computation if any occurs in the LGN.
3. For white noise stimuli, responses are precise and reliable.
4. PRECISION is the trial to trial jitter in spike TIMING (order 1msec) feed forward inhibition may be the mechanism of precise timing.
5. RELIABILITY is the trial to trial variability in spike NUMBER (subpoisson) refractoriness may be the mechanism of reliable spike count.
6. BURSTING in the LGN is a distinct biophysical phenomenon, of controversial importance. The *right* question to ask is whether the bursting state is visually primed and whether priming itself encodes information.
7. We now have a visually behaving rodent prep to address these questions.

Take home message about efficient coding:
1. Natural scenes are full of spatial and temporal correlations.
2. This suggests WHY center-surround RF's are GOOD: redundancy reduction.
2. Test: LGN responses to natural scenes are decorrelated. (whitened)
3. More generally: are natural scenes optimal stimuli?
is this even the right question?

Readings:

Reinagel P and Reid RC (2000) Temporal coding of visual information in the thalamus. J. Neurosci. 20:5392-5400.pdf

Reinagel, P (2000) Information theory in the brain. Current Biology 10:R542-R544.pdf

Kara, P, Reinagel, P, Reid, RC (2000) Low response variability in simultaneously recorder retinal, thalamic, and cortical neurons. Neuron 27:635-645.pdf

Reinagel P and Reid RC (2002) Precise firing events are conserved across neurons. J. Neurosci. 22:6837-6841. pdf

Denning KS and Reinagel P (2005) Visual control of burst priming in the anesthetized Lateral Geniculate Nucleus. J. Neurosci 25:3531-3538. pdf

Borst A and Theunissen FE (1999) Information theory and neural coding. Nature Neuroscience 2:947-957.pdf

Sherman SM (2001) A wake-up call from the thalamus. Nature Neuroscience 4:344-346.pdf

Rieke F, Bodnar DA and Bialek W (2003) Naturalistic stimuli increase the rate and efficiency of information transmission by primary auditory afferents. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B (1995) 262:259-265.pdf

Dan Y, Atick JJ and Reid RC (1996) Efficient coding of natural scenes in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus: Experimental test of a computational theory. J. Neurosci. 16:3351-3362. pdf

Alitto HJ, Weyand TG and Usrey WM (2005) Distinct properties of stimulus-evoked busts in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus. J. Neurosci 25:514-523. pdf

Lesica NA and Stanley GB (2004) Encoding of natural scene movies by tonic and burst spikes in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus. J. Neurosci. 24:10731-10740. pdf

Tutorials: (click)

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