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Retina Adapts To Seek The Unexpected, Ignore The Commonplace

Novel cues drive animal behavior; 'our thirst for novelty begins in the eye itself,' scientists say

Cambridge, Mass. - July 7, 2005 - Researchers at Harvard University have found evidence that the retina actively seeks novel features in the visual environment, dynamically adjusting its processing in order to seek the unusual while ignoring the commonplace. The scientists report in this week's issue of the journal Nature on their finding that this principle of novelty-detection operates in many visual environments.

'Apparently our thirst for novelty begins in the eye itself,' says Markus Meister, the Jeff C. Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. 'Our eyes report the visual world to the brain, but not very faithfully. Instead, the retina creates a cartoonist's sketch of the visual scene, highlighting key features while suppressing the less interesting regions.'

These findings provide evidence that the ultimate goal of the visual system is not simply to construct internally an exact reproduction of the external world, Meister and his colleagues write in Nature. Rather, the system seeks to extract from the onslaught of raw visual information the few bits of data that are relevant to behavior. This entails the discarding of signals that are less useful, and dynamic retinal adaptation provides a means of stripping from the visual stream predictable and therefore less newsworthy signals.

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