The Journal of Neuroscience, February 1, 2001, 21(3):961-973
The Information Content of Spontaneous Retinal Waves
Daniel A.
Butts and
Daniel S.
Rokhsar
Physical Biosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory and Department of Physics, University of California,
Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720-7300
Spontaneous neural activity that is present in the mammalian retina
before the onset of vision is required for the refinement of retinotopy
in the lateral geniculate nucleus and superior colliculus. This paper
explores the information content of this retinal activity, with the
goal of determining constraints on the nature of the developmental
mechanisms that use it. Through information-theoretic analysis of
multielectrode and calcium-imaging experiments, we show that the
spontaneous retinal activity present early in development provides
information about the relative positions of retinal ganglion cells and
can, in principle, be used at retinogeniculate and retinocollicular synapses to refine retinotopy. Remarkably, we find that most
retinotopic information provided by retinal waves exists on relatively
coarse time scales, suggesting that developmental mechanisms must be sensitive to timing differences from 100 msec up to 2 sec to make optimal use of it. In fact, a simple Hebbian-type learning rule with a
correlation window on the order of seconds is able to extract the bulk
of the available information. These findings are consistent with bursts
of action potentials (rather than single spikes) being the unit of
information used during development and suggest new experimental
approaches for studying developmental plasticity of the
retinogeniculate and retinocollicular synapses. More generally, these
results demonstrate how the properties of neuronal systems can be
inferred from the statistics of their input.
Key words:
information theory; activity dependent; development; retinal waves; retinogeniculate; refinement; retinotopy
Copyright © 2001 Society for Neuroscience 0270-6474/01/213961-13$05.00/0
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