Temporal pattern recognition in retinal ganglion cells is mediated by dynamical inhibitory synapses

Simone Ebert (1, 2, 3) , Thomas Buffet (4) , B. Semihcan Sermet , Olivier Marre (4) , Bruno Cessac (2)

1 Neuromod Institute
2 BIOVISION - Biologically plausible Integrative mOdels of the Visual system : towards synergIstic Solutions for visually-Impaired people and artificial visiON
3 UniCA - Université Côte d'Azur
4 Institut de la Vision

A fundamental task for the brain is to generate predictions of future sensory inputs, and signal errors in these predictions. Many neurons have been shown to signal omitted stimuli during periodic stimulation, even in the retina. However, the mechanisms of this error signaling are unclear. Here we show that depressing inhibitory synapses enable the retina to signal an omitted stimulus in a flash sequence. While ganglion cells, the retinal output, responded to an omitted flash with a constant latency over many frequencies of the flash sequence, we found that this was not the case once inhibition was blocked. We built a simple circuit model and showed that depressing inhibitory synapses were a necessary component to reproduce our experimental findings. We also generated new predictions with this model, that we confirmed experimentally. Depressing inhibitory synapses could thus be a key component to generate the predictive responses observed in many brain areas.

Domaines: Neurobiologie

Simone Ebert, Thomas Buffet, B. Semihcan Sermet, Olivier Marre, Bruno Cessac. Temporal pattern recognition in retinal ganglion cells is mediated by dynamical inhibitory synapses. 2023. ⟨hal-03939794⟩