
==== Front
bioRxiv
BIORXIV
bioRxiv
2692-8205
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

37645934
10.1101/2023.08.12.552902
preprint
4
Article
Fixational Eye Movements Enhance the Precision of Visual Information Transmitted by the Primate Retina
Wu Eric G. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8315-3288

Brackbill Nora http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0308-1382

Rhoades Colleen
Kling Alexandra http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5718-9313

Gogliettino Alex R. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4262-9395

Shah Nishal P. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1275-0381

Sher Alexander http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6655-6456

Litke Alan M. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3973-3642

Simoncelli Eero P. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1206-527X

Chichilnisky E.J. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5613-0248

26 8 2024
2023.08.12.552902https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use.
http://biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101/2023.08.12.552902
nihpp-2023.08.12.552902.pdf
Abstract

Fixational eye movements alter the number and timing of spikes transmitted from the retina to the brain, but whether these changes enhance or degrade the retinal signal is unclear. To quantify this, we developed a Bayesian method for reconstructing natural images from the recorded spikes of hundreds of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in the macaque retina (male), combining a likelihood model for RGC light responses with the natural image prior implicitly embedded in an artificial neural network optimized for denoising. The method matched or surpassed the performance of previous reconstruction algorithms, and provides an interpretable framework for characterizing the retinal signal. Reconstructions were improved with artificial stimulus jitter that emulated fixational eye movements, even when the eye movement trajectory was assumed to be unknown and had to be inferred from retinal spikes. Reconstructions were degraded by small artificial perturbations of spike times, revealing more precise temporal encoding than suggested by previous studies. Finally, reconstructions were substantially degraded when derived from a model that ignored cell-to-cell interactions, indicating the importance of stimulusevoked correlations. Thus, fixational eye movements enhance the precision of the retinal representation.
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