Publication Date:
1987-10-16
Description:
The visual system is able to accurately represent the spatiotemporal relations among the elements of a changing visual scene as the image moves across the retinal surface. This precise spatiotemporal mapping occurs despite great variability in retinal position and conduction velocity even among retinal ganglion cells of the same physiological class-a variability that would seem to reduce the precision with which spatiotemporal information can be transmitted to central visual areas. There was a strong negative relation between the intraretinal and extraretinal conduction time for axons of individual ganglion cells of the X-cell class. The effect of this relation was to produce a nearly constant total transmission time between the soma of a retinal X cell and its central target site. Thus, the variation in the conduction velocities of retinal ganglion cell axons may ensure that, regardless of the constraints imposed by retinal topography, a precise spatiotemporal central representation of the retinal image is maintained.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Stanford, L R -- EY04977/EY/NEI NIH HHS/ -- HD03352/HD/NICHD NIH HHS/ -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1987 Oct 16;238(4825):358-60.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Comparative Biosciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison 53705.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3659918" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Action Potentials
;
Animals
;
Axons/*physiology
;
Cats
;
Electric Stimulation
;
Evoked Potentials, Visual
;
*Neural Conduction
;
Optic Nerve/physiology/ultrastructure
;
Retina/physiology/*ultrastructure
;
Retinal Ganglion Cells/*ultrastructure
;
Time Factors
;
Visual Perception/physiology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
