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The Optimal Synapse for Sparse, Binary Signals in the Rod Pathway

s9905130{at}sms.ed.ac.uk, Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, School of Informatics, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, U.K.

Mark C. W. van Rossum

mvanross{at}inf.ed.ac.uk, Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, School of Informatics, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, U.K.

The sparsity of photons at very low light levels necessitates a nonlinear synaptic transfer function between the rod photoreceptors and the rod-bipolar cells. We examine different ways to characterize the performance of the pathway: the error rate, two variants of the mutual information, and the signal-to-noise ratio. Simulation of the pathway shows that these approaches yield substantially different performance at very low light levels and that maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio yields the best performance when judged from simulated images. The results are compared to recent data.