Fig. 3: The recursive bistratified ganglion cell is an ON–OFF direction-selective type.

a Dendritic morphology of a recursive bistratified ganglion cell in macaque retina retrogradely labeled and photostained in vitro after rhodamine dextran tracer injections in the LGN. b ON–OFF response evoked by a 500 ms light step in a recursive bistratified cell targeted for whole-cell current-clamp recording identified by tracer coupling from an A1 amacrine cell (see Fig. 4 for details). c Polar plot of extracellularly recorded spike activity evoked by a bar of light (100 µm width, 600 µm height) moving (2000 µm/s) across the cell’s receptive field. Spikes were summed from separate bursts of spikes evoked by 2 sweeps of the bar stimulus. d Plot showing Direction Selectivity Index (DSI) and preferred direction of spike activity evoked by a moving bar in 26 recursive bistratified ganglion cells extracellularly recorded from 5 different (color coded) retrogradely labeled retinas. The mean DSI ± s.d. of this data set was 0.82 ± 0.20 (n = 26). The stimulus parameters (bar dimensions, velocity, and contrast) were not standardized across all experiments, which may contribute to the cell-to-cell differences in DSI.