Question

31. Discuss the concept of receptive fields and how they are "distributed" across the retina. What types of retinal receptive fields are there?

Answer 1

The receptive field is a term originally coined by Sherrington (1906) to describe an area of the body surface where a stimulus could elicit a reflex. Hartline extended the term to sensory neurons defining the receptive field as a restricted region of visual space where a luminous stimulus could drive electrical responses in a retinal ganglion cell. In Hartline’s own words, ‘Responses can be obtained in a given optic nerve fiber only upon illumination of a certain restricted region of the retina, termed the receptive field of the fiber’. After Hartline (1938), the term receptive field has been extended to other neurons in the visual pathway, other sensory neurons and other sensory pathways.