Abstract

In animals like cat and monkey, which have a specialized central area in the retina, the distribution of photoreceptors and the organization of their connections to the brain change greatly as one moves from the central to the peripheral retina. This is reflected in several properties of retinal ganglion cells whose axons form the optic nerve. The density of cells is highest in the central area and, despite the fact that the smallest receptive fields are found there, the overlap of receptive fields is generally greatest. Increasing eccentricity leads to reduced density of cells, larger receptive fields, and some changes in the temporal characteristics of their responses. The interpretation of these observations is made more complicated by the fact that in both species several distinct classes of ganglion cell have been identified and these differ in their distributions on the retina. The purpose of the talk is to characterize the general changes in properties of retinal ganglion cells that occur as one moves from the central to the peripheral retina and to compare the representations of the image transmitted by the different classes of cell.

© 1985 Optical Society of America