White-noise analysis in the neuron network of the vertebrate retina

In the real world, the visual environment consists of dynamic light stimuli which vary continuously in time, space, color and intensity. Here we summarize physiological experiments in the retinal neuron network which show that a white-noise modulated light stimulus can be used to define the simultaneous linear and nonlinear response components underlying complex visual processing such as color/contrast sensitivity and spatio-temporal receptive field. This research has provided new insight into how such visual information is coded in the spike discharges of ganglion cells