Modifying a biologically inspired retina simulator to reconstruct realistic responses to moving stimuli

The visual system constantly uses anticipation in everyday life, to compensate for the 30 to 150-ms delay that exists between the perception of a visual stimulus and the neural responses it elicits. Without this anticipation, a tennisman, for instance, would be unable to hit a moving ball. Neurobiologists first believed that the anticipation only happens in the visual cortex, but recent studies have shown that it starts earlier, in the retina. To better understand the state of the art and possibly propose new experiments, we are working on a retina simulator reproducing anticipation. Ultimately, we would like to use our reconstructed retina spike trains as inputs to a primary visual cortex simulator, and understand all the mechanisms lying behind anticipation. This work is done within the ANR project : Trajectory.