Temporal Characteristics of Neonatal Chick Retinal Ganglion Cell Responses: Effects of Luminance, Contrast, and Color

We perform microelectrode array recordings of neonatal chick retina explants and report stimulus-dependent response properties of different retinal ganglion cell (RGC) types to various luminance and contrast adaptation conditions. The isolated single units indicate wavelength-sensitive response properties for all the retinal ganglion cell types recorded from. Responses to different luminance and contrast conditions investigated as a function of wavelength indicates a combination of adaptation and sensitization features in the recorded population of RGCs. We further demonstrate the presence of complementary response properties in most of the RGCs to blue (450 nm) and green (530 nm) light input and infer that luminance, contrast and color information are encoded in a wide variety of metrics such as latency, response event duration and pairwise correlations.