Origin and functional impact of early nonlinearities in primate retina

Receptive fields provide a concise description of the stimulus selectivity of visual neurons. But this stimulus selectivity is neither static nor linear, and these nonlinear effects are not well captured by standard linear or pseudo-linear receptive field models. At the same time, receptive field models incorporating nonlinear effects are largely empirical, and are not easily interpreted in terms of underlying cellular and synaptic mechanisms. Here we show that two nonlinear mechanisms in the primate outer retina shape neural responses and that these contribute significantly to responses to natural stimuli and to the retinal output signals. Incorporating these outer retinal nonlinearities into models for visual function will improve our ability to identify the mechanistic origin of specific features of downstream visual responses.