Information synergy in the anticipatory dynamics of a retina

Qi-Rong Lin^2,3, Po-Yu Chou^1,3, Chi-Keung Chan^3*

¹Dept of Physics, National Central University, Chungli, Taiwan
²Dept of Physics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
³Institute of Physics, Academa Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

* Presenter:Chi-Keung Chan, email:ckchan@gate.sinica.edu.tw

Anticipation is the phenomenon in which the response of a system is predictive of the stimulation. The encoding of stochastic light intensity (x) into spikes is investigated in an experiment with retinas from bullfrogs to understand the mechanism of anticipation of a retina. Partial information decomposition of the mutual information between the spike rates and the joint state {x, dx/dt} is found to be consistent with the encoding by the linear combination of x and dx/dt where is the rate of change of x. This spike rate encoding form indicates that a retina is capable of anticipation based on the synergistic information generation between x and dx/dt. Our results suggest that illusions such as the anticipation studied here during retinal perception can originate from the recombination of information extracted in the retinal network.

Keywords: Anticipatory Dynamics, Retina, Information Synergy, Negative Group Delay, Mutual Information