Inference of Nonlinear Spatial Subunits by Spike-Triggered Clustering in Primate Retina

N P Shah, N Brackbill, C E Rhoades, A Tikidji-Hamburyan, G Goetz, A Litke, A Sher, E P Simoncelli and EJ Chichilnisky

, Technical Report , Dec 2018.

DOI: 10.1101/496422

This paper has been superseded by:
Inference of nonlinear receptive field subunits with spike-triggered clustering
N P Shah, N Brackbill, C Rhoades, A Tikidji-Hamburyan, G Goetz, A Litke, A Sher, E P Simoncelli and E J Chichilnisky.
eLife, Mar 2020.


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    • Integration of rectified synaptic inputs is a widespread nonlinear motif in sensory neuroscience. We present a novel method for maximum likelihood estimation of nonlinear subunits by soft-clustering spike-triggered stimuli. Subunits estimated from parasol ganglion cells recorded in macaque retina partitioned the receptive field into compact regions, likely representing bipolar cell inputs. Joint clustering with multiple RGCs revealed shared subunits in neighboring cells, producing a parsimonious population model. Closed-loop subunit validation was then performed by projecting white noise into the null space of the linear receptive field. Responses to these null stimuli were more accurately explained by a model with multiple subunits, and were stronger in OFF cells than ON cells. Presentation of natural stimuli containing jittering edges and textures also revealed greater response prediction accuracy with the subunit model. Finally, the generality of the approach was demonstrated by application to V1 data.
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