In humans, midget and parasol ganglion cells account for most of the input from the eyes to the brain. Yet, how they encode visual information is unknown. Here, we perform large-scale multi-electrode array recordings from retinas of treatment-naive patients who underwent enucleation surgery for choroidal malignant melanomas. We identify robust differences in the function of midget and parasol ganglion cells, consistent asymmetries between their ON and OFF types (that signal light increments and decrements, respectively) and divergence in the function of human versus non-human primate retinas. Our computational analyses reveal that the receptive fields of human midget and parasol ganglion cells divide naturalistic movies into adjacent spatiotemporal frequency domains with equal stimulus power, while the asymmetric response functions of their ON and OFF types simultaneously maximize stimulus coverage and information transmission and minimize metabolic cost. Thus, midget and parasol ganglion cells in the human retina efficiently encode our visual environment.

在人类中，侏儒和阳伞神经节细胞占从眼睛到大脑的大部分输入。然而，它们如何编码视觉信息尚不清楚。在这里，我们对接受脉络膜恶性黑色素瘤摘除术的初治患者的视网膜进行大规模多电极阵列记录。我们确定了侏儒和阳伞神经节细胞功能的显着差异，它们的 ON 和 OFF 类型之间的一致不对称性（分别表示光的增加和减少）以及人类与非人类灵长类动物视网膜功能的差异。我们的计算分析表明，人类侏儒和阳伞神经节细胞的感受野将自然电影划分为具有相同刺激功率的相邻时空频域，而它们的 ON 和 OFF 类型的不对称响应函数同时最大化刺激覆盖和信息传输并最小化代谢成本。因此，人类视网膜中的侏儒和阳伞神经节细胞有效地编码了我们的视觉环境。