The retina as a dynamical system
Channel: NeuroMat
Date: 2021-06-15

The webinar "The retina as a dynamical system" was given by Bruno Cessac, from Université Côte d’Azur, Inria/Biovision team and Neuromod Institute.

After a brief introduction on retina’s structure and dynamics, he will present some results where dynamical systems-, bifurcations-, and ergodic-theory provide useful insights on retinal behaviour and dynamics: retinal waves, motion anticipation and spatio-temporal correlations induced by a stimulus.

In this talk, Bruno will adopt a specific, modeller, point of view. The retina is a specific organ, with specific neurons and circuits, rather different from their cortical counterparts, leading to specific questions - requiring specific techniques - that can be addressed in the realm of dynamical systems theory. More precisely, the retina is a high dimensional, non autonomous dynamical system, layered and structured, with non stationary and spatially inhomogeneous entries (visual scenes). It is therefore necessary to go, as much as we can, beyond the assumption of stationarity.