surround asymmetry

A Panoramic View on Vision

Statistics of natural scenes are not uniform - their structure varies dramatically from ground to sky. It remains unknown whether these non-uniformities are reflected in the large-scale organization of the early visual system and what benefits such adaptations would confer. By deploying an efficient coding argument, we predict that changes in the structure of receptive fields across visual space increase the efficiency of sensory coding. To test this experimentally, developed a simple, novel imaging system that is indispensable for studies at this scale. In agreement with our predictions, we could show that receptive fields of retinal ganglion cells change their shape along the dorsoventral axis, with a marked surround asymmetry at the visual horizon. Our work demonstrates that, according to principles of efficient coding, the panoramic structure of natural scenes is exploited by the retina across space and cell-types.