Figure 3.

Crescent-shaped ganglion cells are ON direction selective cells. A, At the top is a sample extracellular recording from a crescent-shaped ganglion cell. This cell shows a transient burst of spikes at stimulus onset followed by a sustained component during stimulus presentation indicating on-center receptive field physiology. The bar at the bottom indicates onset and offset of full-field stimulus. Below is an intracellular recording from the same crescent-shaped cell showing the evoked spiking and slow potentials. This cell shows a hyperpolarizing component at light offset characteristic of crescent-shaped ganglion cells. B, Response of the cell to a 50-μm-wide slit of light swept back and forth across the retina along four different orientations. The cell is direction selective for temporal to nasal (rightward) movement along the horizontal axis. C, Schematic showing the direction preference for a cluster of ON DS cells. The cells in middle of the cluster (open circles) show the same temporal to nasal preference. Cells at the edges show different preferences (dark circles) but show neighbors with the same preference as well. These data suggest that DS ganglion cells with the same direction preference tend to form overlapping clusters with cells with different preferences.