Rod signaling in primate retina: range, routing and kinetics

Stimulus or context dependent routing of neural signals through parallel pathways can permit flexible processing of diverse inputs. For example, work in mouse shows that rod photoreceptor signals are routed through several retinal pathways, each specialized for different light levels. This light level-dependent routing of rod signals has been invoked to explain several human perceptual results, but it has not been tested in primate retina. Here we show, surprisingly, that rod signals traverse the primate retina almost exclusively through a single pathway, regardless of light level. Indeed, identical experiments in mouse and primate reveal large differences in how rod signals traverse the retina. These results require reevaluating human perceptual results in terms of flexible computation within this single pathway. This includes a prominent speeding of rod signals with light level – which we show is inherited directly from the rods photoreceptors themselves rather than from different pathways with different kinetics.