Larval salamander retinal population data in response to natural movies from the Chicago Motion Database

Everything that the brain sees must first be encoded by the retina, which maintains a reliable representation of the visual world in many different, complex natural scenes while also adapting to stimulus changes. This study quantifies whether and how the brain selectively encodes stimulus features about scene identity in complex naturalistic environments. While a wealth of previous work has dug into the static and dynamic features of the population code in retinal ganglion cells, less is known about how populations form both flexible and reliable encoding in natural moving scenes. We record the larval salamander retina responding to five different natural movies, over many repeats and use these data to characterize the population code in terms of single-cell fluctuations in rate and pairwise couplings between cells. Decomposing the population code into independent and cell-cell interactions reveals how broad scene structure is encoded in the retinal output. while the single-cell activit..., Neural data Voltage traces from the output, retinal ganglion cell layer of a larval tiger salamander retina were recorded following the methods outlined in O. Marre et al., Mapping a complete neural population in the retina. J. Neurosci. 32, 14859–14873 (2012). In brief, the retina was isolated in darkness and pressed against a 252-channel multielectrode array. Voltage recordings were taken during stimulus presentation of both natural movies and white noise stimuli and spike-sorted using an automated clustering algorithm that was hand-curated after initial template clustering and fits. This technique captured a highly overlapping neural population of 93 cells that fully tiled the recorded region of visual space. Spike times were binned at 16.667ms for all analyses presented.
Visual stimuli A white noise checkerboard stimulus (with binary white and black squares) was played at 30 frames per second (fps) for 30 minutes prior to and after the natural scene stimuli. Five different natural m..., , # Larval salamander retinal population data in response to natural movies from the Chicago Motion Database

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4qrfj6qm8](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4qrfj6qm8)

## Description of the data and file structure

This data is described in the 2024 paper \"Stimulus-invariant aspects of the retinal code drive discriminability of natural scenes\". If this data is used for a publication, please cite that paper.

The file contains the following files:

\- MultipleMoviesStim_1_tree.avi

\- MultipleMoviesStim_2_water.avi

\- MultipleMoviesStim_3_grasses.avi

\- MultipleMoviesStim_4_fish.avi

\- MultipleMoviesStim_5_opticflow.avi

\- movieBinnedSpiking.mat

\- binaryCheckerboard.mat

All of the .avi files are the movie stimulus that was shown to the salamander retina as described in our publication. The file \"binaryCheckerboard.mat\" contains three variables: the samplingFreq (the frequency of the response and stimulus timescales measured in hertz), binaryCheckerboard (a ...