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Natural vision is a highly dynamic process. Frequent body, head, and eye movements constantly bring new images onto the retina for brief periods, challenging our understanding of the neural code for vision. We report that certain retinal ganglion cells encode the spatial structure of a briefly presented image in the relative timing of their first spikes. This code is found to be largely invariant to stimulus contrast and robust to noisy fluctuations in response latencies. Mechanistically, the observed response characteristics result from different kinetics in two retinal pathways (‘ON’ and ‘OFF’) that converge onto ganglion cells. This mechanism allows the retina to rapidly and reliably transmit new spatial information with the very first spikes emitted by a neural population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the study that demonstrates how the photoreceptors in the visual system of flies use glial cells as intermediaries to communicate with their neural targets to generate retinotopic circuits. The role of retinotopy in sighted organisms that originates in microcircuits that map visual space is provided. The findings of the study that offer closer understanding how the brain builds a map of the visual world for people to enjoy flashes of color is mentioned.