What can the eye see with melanopsin?

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Nugent, Thomas W.; Zele, Andrew J.
• 署名单位: Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-8802
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2411151121
• 发表日期: 2024-11-26
• 关键词: expressing ganglion-cells; brightness-discrimination; color; cone; sensitivity; irradiance; activation; macaque; vision; retina

摘要

A subpopulation of human retinal ganglion cells contains the melanopsin photopigment, allowing them to act as a fifth photoreceptor class. These ganglion cells project to the visual cortex, but to reveal its intrinsic contribution to conscious vision is technically challenging as it requires melanopsin to be separated from the responses originating in the rods and three cone classes. Using a display engineered to isolate the melanopic visual response, we show that it detects lowpass spatial (<= 0.35 cycles per degree) and temporal image content (<= 1 Hz) but cannot reconstruct the stimulus form necessary for object recognition. We demonstrate that a model of the spatially diffuse intrinsically- photosensitive retinal ganglion cells' sampling structure is predictive of the measured image reconstruction limits of melanopic spatial vision. Separately, we find that under five- photoreceptor silent substitution conditions, rod pathways alone can support form vision in bright lighting when typically thought to be in saturation. Form vision that is absent from melanopsin can be only perceived in mixtures of both melanopsin and rod signals because it is the rod pathway that sees the form. Our findings show that melanopsin's unique tuning to the diffuse and slow- changing elements in the world provides a stabilized reference point for vision.