Markus Meister, Jeff C. Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University
Starting with the raw optical image projected on the photoreceptors, the retina performs a great deal of visual processing to compute about twenty parallel neural images, which are transmitted to the brain by the optic nerve fibers. I will describe some of these neural computations identified only recently and explain how they are accomplished by circuits of retinal interneurons. I will also discuss the implications of these newly discovered functions for processing in higher stations of the visual system that draw their inputs from the retina.