Spatial tuning properties of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) are sharpened by lateral inhibition originating at both the outer and inner plexiform layers. Lateral inhibition in the retina contributes to local contrast enhancement and sharpens edges. In this study, we used dynamic clamp recordings to examine the contribution of inner plexiform inhibition, originating from spiking amacrine cells, t...

Contour integration is believed to occur based on lateral interaction between neurons with similar orientation tuning. The exact neural mechanisms underlying such interactions, and their developmental origins, are not well understood. This paper suggests through computational simulations that synchronization mediated by patchy lateral connections, formed through input-driven self-organization, ...

The use of quartz tuning fork sensors as probes for scanning probe microscopy is growing in popularity. Working in shear mode, some methods achieve a lateral resolution comparable with that obtained with standard cantilevered probes, but only in experiments conducted in air or vacuum. Here, we report a method to produce and use commercial AFM tips in electrically driven quartz tuning fork senso...

Lateral inhibition represents a well-studied example of biology's ability to self-organize multicellular spatial patterns with single-cell precision. Despite established biochemical mechanisms for lateral inhibition (e.g., Delta-Notch), it remains unclear how cell-cell signaling delays inherent to these mechanisms affect patterning outcomes. We investigate a compact model of lateral inhibition ...

To what extent do the mechanisms generating different receptive field properties of neurons depend on each other? We investigated this question theoretically within the context of orientation and direction tuning of simple cells in the mammalian visual cortex. In our model a cortical cell of the "simple" type receives its orientation tuning by afferent convergence of aligned receptive fields of...

To answer the question whether OFF response amplitude (firing rate) of visual cortical cells varies as a function of stimulus duration, a series of such cells from areas 17 and 18 of the cat were investigated with a stationary light bar, presented for different durations (10-3200 msec) over the receptive field. Out of a sample of 174 cells tested, 58 cells were found for which the OFF responses...