Figure 8. Estimation of midget cell activation. A, Receptive fields (2σ boundary from a Gaussian fit to the spatial component of the STA) of nearly complete ON parasol and OFF parasol cell populations and partial ON midget and OFF midget cell populations, in a single raphe preparation. B, Receptive fields of simulated complete populations of ON midget and OFF midget cells in the same preparation as A (see Materials and Methods). C, Response probability as a function of distance from stimulating electrode and applied current (see Materials and Methods). This relationship was determined using all of the electrical stimuli and responses from recorded midget cells in A. D, White noise reconstructions from parasol cells and the resulting reconstruction from the activation of simulated midget cells, in a single raphe preparation (A–C; pixel sizes shown, 352, 220, 110, and 55 μm). The first column shows the original image; the second column shows the optimal reconstruction (i.e., achievable with perfect control over the firing of each RGC); the third column shows the empirical reconstruction that is achievable by optimized stimulation based on recorded evoked responses (Shah et al., 2019b, 2022; see Materials and Methods); the fourth column shows the pixels that were incorrectly reconstructed relative to the original image (red, incorrect; blue, correct); the fifth column shows the reconstruction (third column) summed with the simulated midget cell noise (see Materials and Methods); the sixth column shows the reconstruction summed with the simulated midget cell noise that can be achieved using an early stopping criterion (see Materials and Methods); the seventh column shows the pixels that were incorrectly reconstructed relative to the original image using the early stopping criterion (red, incorrect; blue, correct). E, Naturalistic image reconstructions from parasol cells and the resulting reconstruction from the activation of midget cells in the same preparation as D. The first column shows the original image; the second column shows the optimal reconstruction after application of the same trained CAE as in Figure 7; the third column shows the empirical reconstruction after application of the CAE; the fourth column shows the linear empirical parasol cell reconstruction (linear portion of column 3) summed with the linear simulated midget cell noise; the fifth column shows the resulting image after applying the CAE to the image in column 4. F, Fractional error (see Materials and Methods) between the white noise empirical parasol cell reconstruction (column D3) and the empirical parasol cell reconstruction summed with midget cell noise, after full stimulation (column D5) or after early stopping (column D6). Each data point denotes the average fractional error over 15 images at each pixel size. G, Fractional error between the naturalistic image empirical parasol cell reconstruction and the empirical parasol cell reconstruction summed with the midget cell noise. Fractional error was calculated using both the linear reconstructions as well as the linear reconstructions enhanced by the CAE (see Materials and Methods). The bar plots denote the average fractional error over 100 naturalistic images.