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Updated: Oct 16, 2025

Author Spotlight: Using the Split Retina Technique for Enhanced Access and Accelerated Experiments
Published on: January 16, 2024
Information synergy in the anticipatory dynamics of a retina
Qi-Rong Lin1,2, Po-Yu Chou1,3, C K Chan1,3
1Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Taipei 115, Taiwan.
Abstract:
Anticipation is the phenomenon in which the response of a system is predictive of the stimulation. The encoding of stochastic light intensity (x) into spikes is investigated in an experiment with retinas from bullfrogs to understand the mechanism of anticipation of a retina. Partial information decomposition of the mutual information between the spike rates and the joint state {x,x[over ̇]} is found to be consistent with the encoding by the linear combination of x and x[over ̇] where x[over ̇] is the rate of change of x. This spike rate encoding form indicates that a retina is capable of anticipation based on the synergistic information generation between x and x[over ̇]. Our results suggest that illusions such as the anticipation studied here during retinal perception can originate from the recombination of information extracted in the retinal network.
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