Information Synergy in the Anticipatory Dynamics of a Retina

Abstract

Visual perceptions often come with illusions whose physical origin are not well understood yet. The encoding of stochastic light intensity $x(t)$ into spikes with firing rate $r(t)$ at time $t$ is investigated in an experiment with retinas from bullfrogs to understand the mechanism of anticipation. Partial information decomposition of the mutual information between $r$ and the combined state $\{x,\dot{x}\}$ is found to be consistent with the encoding form: $r(t)\sim (1-\lambda )x(t)+\lambda \dot{x}(t){\tau }_0$ with $\lambda$ being a system dependent parameter and ${\tau }_0$ a constant. This form of $r(t)$ indicates that a retina is capable of anticipation based on the synergistic information generation between $x$ and $\dot{x}$. Our results suggest that illusions such as the anticipation studied here during retinal perception can originate from the recombination of information extracted in the retinal network.

References in corpus (2)

• Exploration of synergistic and redundant information sharing in static and dynamical Gaussian systems
• Anticipation and Negative Group Delay in a Retina