Fig. 3: A tight link between polarity, kinetics, and colour opponency.

a Overview of selected cluster means to the full set of presented stimuli, illustrating some of their systematic differences. For simplicity, only the 100% contrast response is shown for WS, while only the red- (630 nm) and blue-responses (420 nm) are shown for CS. The full set of cluster means are shown in Supplemental Fig. S3. The entire dataset alongside a basic, cluster wise analysis, is interactively plotted and available for download at http://chicken-data.retinal-functomics.net/. b, c Relationships of transience (b) and colour opponency (c) with polarity for all clusters based on their mean 100% contrast WS responses (Methods). Symbol size denotes the number of cells allocated to a cluster as indicated, while colouration indicates the four response groups: Off (black), OnOff (brown), On (orange/grey). Note that On-responses are further divided by the kinetics of their CS-responses into a transient (orange) and a sustained group (grey)—cf. Supplemental Fig. 4a, b. b Further shows the mean ± SD shadings for the same relationship based on all individual cells (light grey). A positive transience index denotes a transient cell, 0 sustained, and negative a temporally increasing response, as evaluated by comparing the peak response in two time-windows following the step transition: 80–160 ms and 240–2000 ms (Methods). d–f As (b), transience and polarity indices of RGCs found in the retina of larval zebrafish (d, based on ref. ¹⁰), mice (e, based on ref. ⁴³), and humans (f, based on ref. ⁴⁴). Linear correlation tests, two-sided: Chicken: p < 0.001; Zebrafish: p < 0.001; Mouse: 0.41; Human: 0.13. Note that in (d–f), the colour code from (b) does not apply. For further detail see also Supplemental Fig. S4d–g. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Human silhouette in (f) from silhouettegarden.com.