An image-computable spatio-chromatic receptive field model of the midget retinal ganglion cell mosaic across the retina

Image-computable models of primate retinal ganglion cell (RGC) mosaics that are synthesized and constrained jointly by optical, anatomical and physiological properties, and which operate on images defined by their spatial-spectral radiance, do not currently exist. Here, we deploy a novel computational framework which synthesizes mosaics of linear spatio-chromatic receptive fields (RFs) of ON midget RGCs (mRGCs) by integrating published anatomical, physiological, and optical quality measurements, all varying with eccentricity. We use the synthesized mRGC mosaics to simulate both in vivo and in vitro physiological experiments and demonstrate the model’s consistency with published data. The model enables computation of how visual performance is shaped by the representation of visual information provided by the linear spatiochromatic processing stage of midget RGCs. The developed computational framework carefully accounts for the effect of physiological optics on mRGC responses, enables comparison of in vivo and in vitro data, and allows exploration of how different assumptions about RF organization, such as selectivity for the type of cones pooled by the RF center mechanism, affect physiological responses and psychophysical performance. The open-source and freely available implementation provides a platform for understanding how the linear spatiochromatic receptive field representation of the mRGCs shapes visual performance, as well as a foundation for future work that incorporates response nonlinearities, temporal filtering, and extends to additional RGC mosaics.