Colloquium Artificial Intelligence - Maarten Kamermans, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience

Title: The retina is a highly adaptive feature detector

Abstract:

The vertebrate retina is a multilayered network of neurons. Photoreceptors are the light sensitive neurons. These neurons project via one layer of relay neurons, the bipolar cells, to the output of the retina: the retinal ganglion cells. At both synaptic layers numerous highly specialized interactions take place. I hope to convince you that the retina is not just a kind of pixel based CCD camera that sends images to the brain. It is a highly specialized feature extractor that sends specialized information to many places in the brain. I will give a number of examples about how retinal processing adapts to local and global image features and, if time permits, illustrate how malfunctioning of only a few retinal neurons, that code highly specific information can affect the behavior of the animal profoundly.