Fig. 6: ON/OFF domains shape receptive field structure.

a Correlation between ON/OFF and simple-cell receptive fields. Each panel displays the result of one experiment. The top row displays the difference between the average ON (μ_on) and OFF (μ_off) receptive fields in the population, while the bottom row shows the average of all simple-cell receptive fields (μs). The two are correlated (p < 0.001 in all cases). b Diversity of receptive fields in the population, showing the average along with the receptive fields of individual cells and their correlation coefficient with respect to the average. c Distribution of correlation coefficients between μs and those of individual cells in one experiment. d Modeling simple-cell receptive fields as linear combination of ON and OFF signals in a local neighborhood. The diagram shows a cartoon of a top view of a cortical patch of V1. ON and OFF cells define domains where one representation is dominant. Simple cells are assumed to pool ON and OFF signals within their neighborhood. e Model performance as a function of neighborhood size. Performance starts to saturate at a neighborhood size of k~5. Dashed lines indicate 25th and 75th percentiles of the distribution of correlation coefficients for each neighborhood size). f Example of four model fits. g Model performance for all neurons in one experiment for k = 5 showing the distribution of correlation coefficients between the actual receptive fields and their approximation by the model. h Distribution of distances for ON and OFF from simple cells for a neighborhood size of five—most cells are within 50μm of the target neuron. ON cells are statistically more distant than OFF cells (\(p=1{{{{{\boldsymbol{.}}}}}}2{10}^{-18}\), rank sum test). i,- Distribution of weights for ON and OFF neurons in decreasing order by rank (top). Weights are normalized by their total contribution. Two ON or OFF cells are sufficient to account for 90% of the total synaptic input to the neuron, as shown by the average cumulative distribution (bottom, red curve; individual cells shown by black curves). This dataset had \({n}_{{{{{{\rm{on}}}}}}}=379\), \({n}_{{{{{{\rm{off}}}}}}}=895\) and \({n}_{{{{{{\rm{on}}}}}}+{{{{{\rm{off}}}}}}}=307\) cells (corresponding to dataset #7 in Table 1). Source data provided for panels c, e, g, h, i.