Abstract

A midget (P) ganglion cell in or close to the macaque's fovea has a receptive field in which the center is probably driven by a single cone. Thus, even if the surround drew indiscriminately on signals from all classes of cone, such a receptive field would be chromatically opponent. We have used a computer simulation to analyze the chromatic properties of P-cells with receptive fields constructed by drawing on a mosaic of R, G, and B cones, and allowing single or multiple cones to contribute to the center, without selection of the classes of cones that contribute to center and surround. For each synthetic cell we calculated the spectral sensitivity and also the weights that it attached to signals from the different classes of cone, and we compared the distribution of weights obtained from a population of such cells with the distribution obtained by Derrington, Krauskopf, and Lennie [J. Physiol. 357, 241 (1984)] in their analysis of the chromatic properties of P-cells in LGN.

© 1989 Optical Society of America