On the potential role of lateral connectivity in retinal anticipation

Abstract

We analyse the potential effects of lateral connectivity (amacrine cells and gap junctions) on motion anticipation in the retina. Our main result is that lateral connectivity can-under conditions analysed in the paper-trigger a wave of activity enhancing the anticipation mechanism provided by local gain control [8, 17]. We illustrate these predictions by two examples studied in the experimental literature: differential motion sensitive cells [1] and direction sensitive cells where direction sensitivity is inherited from asymmetry in gap junctions connectivity [73]. We finally present reconstructions of retinal responses to 2D visual inputs to assess the ability of our model to anticipate motion in the case of three different 2D stimuli.