Oxyopia Abstract

October 30, 2009
Friday, 4:00 PM
489 Minor Hall

Fred Rieke, PhD
Associate Professor, Investigator HHMI, Dept. of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington, Seattle
Host: Marla Feller

Title

Cone noise and the sensitivity of cone vision

Abstract

Most of us go through each day blissfully unaware of the limitations of cone vision. Indeed the sensitivity of cone vision, quantified in behavioral measurements, is impressive. Noise in the cone responses poses a fundamental limit to the acuity of cone vision. Yet we do not know whether cone noise or noise in downstream circuits limits the sensitivity of cone vision. I will describe experiments that indicate that cone noise dominates noise in the responses of primate retinal ganglion cells. As a consequence, noise in retinal cells with shared cone inputs covaries, providing a simple picture for the origin of correlated noise. These observations pose important constraints on how the retina reads out the cone signals and on how higher visual centers merge signals from multiple parallel retinal outputs.

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