Quantitative Measure of Population Adaptation of Retinal Ganglion Cells ’ Light Response

Abstract—Adaptation helps retinal ganglion cells encode varying visual signals. However, an index for population adaptation is still lacking. In present study, we applied entropy theory to characterize the process of adaptation for a group of ganglion cells under the stimulus of both full-field white light and pseudo-random checker-board. We noticed that entropy rate shared the same trend with meaning firing rate of the group of cells, and there were some difference of the relationship between entropy rate and firing rate under different visual stimulus, which may caused by the difference of concerted encoding among ganglion cells under different stimulations. Keywords-population adaptation; firing rate; entropy; concerted encoding I