Master Internship: Outer retinal Information Processing

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In the outer retina, major preprocessing of the visually induced neuronal signals occurs. All this preprocessing is aimed to coding the visual stimuli as efficient as possible. However, how this coding occurs and how efficient this is is not studied in great detail. For instance, horizontal cells are second order neurons in the retina. They can be subdivided into three types. One of those cells is assumed to be a detector for luminance (light intensity) the two other cell types are supposed to be involved in detection of color. However, this classification has never been tested quantitatively. In this electrophysiological project we will use intracellular electrodes to record responses of horizontal cells and use information theory and linear/non-linear analysis to determine how well far luminocity and color are seperated at horizontal cell level.