Topographic Variations in Retinal Encoding of Visual Space

Alina Sophie Heukamp, Rebekah Anne Warwick, Michal Rivlin-Etzion

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

A retina completely devoid of topographic variations would be homogenous, encoding any given feature uniformly across the visual field. In a naive view, such homogeneity would appear advantageous. However, it is now clear that retinal topographic variations exist across mammalian species in a variety of forms and patterns. We briefly review some of the more established topographic variations in retinas of different mammalian species and focus on the recent discovery that cells belonging to a single neuronal subtype may exhibit distinct topographic variations in distribution, morphology, and even function. We concentrate on the mouse retina-originally viewed as homogenous-in which genetic labeling of distinct neuronal subtypes and other advanced techniques have revealed unexpected anatomical and physiological topographic variations. Notably, different subtypes reveal different patterns of nonuniformity, which may even be opposite or orthogonal to one another. These topographic variations in the encoding of visual space should be considered when studying visual processing in the retina and beyond. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Vision Science, Volume 6 is September 15, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)237-259
Number of pages23
JournalAnnual Review of Vision Science
Volume6
Early online date22 Apr 2020
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Sep 2020

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Ophthalmology
  • Clinical Neurology

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