Response analysis of vertebrate retina

In a recent work (Oguztöreli, 1980) a mathematical model for studying the neural activities in a vertebrate retina has been investigated, where the basic network contains five interconnected neurons: a receptor cell, a bipolar cell, a horizontal cell, an amacrine cell, and a retinal ganglion cell. More recently, in (Oğuztöreli and O'Mara, 1980) the basic network has been extended to a larger network containing twelve neurons, In both of these works, the performances of the basic and extended models were discussed under different structural and processing conditions with constant inputs by using the results of one of our earlier work (Oğuztöreli, 1979). In the present paper we investigate by simulations the responses of the basic retinal network to piecewise constant and periodic inputs. The step snd frequency responses of the extended retinal network will be discussed in a forthcoming paper.