Spatial Organization Implied by Horizontal Cell Chains in the Vertebrate Retina.

Ronald J. MacGregor

Expert InsightsPublished 1969

The locus of the receptive endings of horizontal cells whose activation eventually influences a given reference point in the retina is explored. For simplicity, it is supposed that all the horizontal cells have the same length and that the spread of their dendritic trees is ignored. Each axon in the chain can be oriented at any angle and all orientations are equally likely. This problem is a two-dimensional isotropic random walk problem which can be solved. Probability densities for nth-order endings in a horizontal cell chain are graphed. The implications of the horizontal cell-chain concept are that its significance in the coding of visual information is probably great but that pursuit of its ramifications is far from straightforward. This random-walk-like organization should be applicable to other subsystems of nerve cells, as well as to many questions outside the realm of neural networks. 10 pp. Ref.

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MacGregor, Ronald J., Spatial Organization Implied by Horizontal Cell Chains in the Vertebrate Retina. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1969. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4218.html.
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