UCSF

When an animal moves through its environment, relative motion between the eye and the world can blur vision. The optokinetic reflex is an innate behavior that counteracts this possibility by responding to the slippage of the visual scene on the retina with counteracting, image-stabilizing eye movements. Previous work identified that ON direction selective retinal ganglion cells, a particular class of motion-sensitive neuron in the retina, are responsible for detecting the global image motion that occurs during self-movement. However, it has been less clear how the information encoded by ON direction selective retinal ganglion cells is used by downstream circuits to inform eye movements. Here, I investigate these mechanisms in mice. Using a combination of electrophysiology, behavioral data, and computational modeling, I demonstrate that a linear subtraction of activity from ON direction selective retinal ganglion cells with different directional tunings can predict the trajectory of optokinetic eye movements across several conditions. I then show how this close connection between the activity of neurons in the retina and a measurable behavioral response can also be used to establish sensitive methods of disease detection. Together, this work demonstrates how deep mechanistic understandings of sensorimotor transformations can reveal important translational insights and applications.