Primate retina trades single-photon detection for high-fidelity contrast encoding

Markku Kilpeläinen; Johan Westö; Jussi Tiihonen; Anton Laihi; Daisuke Takeshita; Fred Rieke; Petri Ala-Laurila

doi:10.1038/s41467-024-48750-y

Primate retina trades single-photon detection for high-fidelity contrast encoding

Markku Kilpeläinen
, Johan Westö
, Jussi Tiihonen
, Anton Laihi
, Daisuke Takeshita
, Fred Rieke
, Petri Ala-Laurila^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering

University of Helsinki
University of Washington

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Scientific › peer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

47 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

How the spike output of the retina enables human visual perception is not fully understood. Here, we address this at the sensitivity limit of vision by correlating human visual perception with the spike outputs of primate ON and OFF parasol (magnocellular) retinal ganglion cells in tightly matching stimulus conditions. We show that human vision at its ultimate sensitivity limit depends on the spike output of the ON but not the OFF retinal pathway. Consequently, nonlinear signal processing in the retinal ON pathway precludes perceptual detection of single photons in darkness but enables quantal-resolution discrimination of differences in light intensity.

Original language	English
Article number	4501
Pages (from-to)	1-9
Number of pages	9
Journal	Nature Communications
Volume	15
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48750-y
Publication status	Published - Dec 2024
MoE publication type	A1 Journal article-refereed

Funding

We thank Drs. Kristian Donner, Greg Field, Kai Kaila, Gabriel Peinado Allina, Greg Schwartz, and Mark Georgeson for excellent comments on the manuscript; Matthew Dunkerley, Sathish Narayanan, and Mark Cafaro for the design of the data acquisition software. Support was provided by the Academy of Finland (296269 to P.A.-L.); the Aalto Brain Centre (J.W.); Svenska kulturfonden (J.W.); The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters (J.W.); The Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation (M.K.); Aalto Centre for Quantum Engineering (CQE) grant (J.T.); University of Helsinki Brain & Mind Doctoral Programme funded position (J.T.) and the NIH (EY 028111 to F.R.). Human silhouette in Fig. 3 and Supplementary Fig. 2 retrieved from Vecteezy.com. We thank Juha Haapala for preparing the monkey silhouette used in Figs. 2, and 3.

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Primate retina trades single-photon detection for high-fidelity contrast encodingFinal published version, 923 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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Primate retina trades single-photon detection for high-fidelity contrast encoding

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New research shines light on the highly sensitive human visual system

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Primate retina trades single-photon detection for high-fidelity contrast encoding

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New research shines light on the highly sensitive human visual system

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