PSYCH 1XX3 Chapter 7.4.2: PSYCH 1XX3 - Module 7.4.2 Notes (Retina Processing)
11 Feb 2017
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Light enters the eye and must: pass through the ganglion cells, pass through the bipolar cells, strike the photoreceptors on the retina at the very back of the eye. At that point, the light is converted into a neural signal that is sent from the photoreceptors to the bipolar cells, and then the ganglion cells, whose axons make up the optic nerve. Cells in the retina that allow areas within a retinal layer to communicate with each other are called horizontal cells and amacrine cells: these cells allow information from adjacent photoreceptors to combine their information. And so, the information from over 130 million rods and cones in the retina converge to travel along only 1 million axons in the optic nerve. This means that some amount of visual processing is done in the retina before the signal is actually sent on to the brain.
