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Steady discharges of macaque retinal ganglion cells

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2009

J. B. Troy
Affiliation:
Biomedical Engineering Department, Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston
B. B. Lee
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-lnstitut für biophysikalische Chemie, D-3400 Göttingen 1, Germany

Abstract

Steady discharges were collected from ganglion cells of the magnocellular (MC) and parvocellular (PC) pathways of the macaque while their receptive fields were uniformly illuminated with a 4.7-deg steady yellow light of photopic illuminance. The mean rates, coefficients of variation, interval distributions, serial correlation coefficients, and power spectra of these discharges were determined. The results presented permit one to estimate the noise power in the discharges of macaque ganglion cells and hence determine how visual signals of different amplitudes will be affected by the noise resident in their discharges.

Although there was some small serial correlation in the discharges of both MC- and PC-pathway cells, their discharges can be considered to result from renewal processes with reasonable accuracy. As with the discharges of cat ganglion cells, macaque ganglion cell discharges can be considered to have approximately gamma-distributed intervals. Steady discharges of MC- and PC-pathway cells show considerable overlap in their statistics, although small but significant differences are present.

Type
Research Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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