human eye Anatomical basisanatomy

The receptive field is essentially a measure of the number of receptors—rods or cones or a mixture of these—that make nervous connections with a single ganglion cell. The organization of centre and periphery implies that the receptors in the periphery of an on-centre cell tend to inhibit it, while those in the centre of the field tend to excite it, so that the effects of a uniform illumination covering the whole field tend to cancel out. This has an important physiological value, as it means, in effect, that the brain is not bombarded with an enormous number of unnecessary messages, as would be the case were every ganglion cell to send discharges along its optic nerve fibre as long as it was illuminated. Instead, the cell tends to respond to change—i.e., the movement of a light or dark spot over the receptive field—and to give an especially prominent response, often when the spot passes from the periphery to the centre, or vice versa. Thus, the centre-periphery organization favours the detection of movement; in a similar way it favours the detection of contours because these give rise to differences in the illumination of the parts of the receptive fields. The anatomical basis of the arrangement presumably is given by the organization of the bipolar and amacrine cells in relation to the dendrites of the ganglion cell; it is interesting that the actual diameter of the centre of the receptive field of a ganglion cell is frequently equal to the area over which its dendrites spread; the periphery exerts its effects presumably by means of amacrine cells that are capable of connecting with bipolars over a wide area. These amacrine cells could exert an inhibitory action on the bipolar cells connected to the receptors of the central zone of the field, preventing them from responding to these receptors; in this case, the ganglion cell related to these bipolars would be of an on-centre and off-periphery type.