Probing the retino-geniculate circuit in cat using circular spot stimuli

Spatial receptive fields of relay cells in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) have commonly been modeled as a difference-of-Gaussians. Recently, we presented an alternative receptive-field model which incorporates the known functional couplings between retina and dLGN. The model gave good fits to recently published experimental data on responses to circular spot stimuli. Moreover, predictions from the modeling compared well with other experimental data available in the literature. Here we derive the connection between these purely spatial receptive-field functions and the spatiotemporal impulse response functions measured in experiments using drifting gratings or white noise analysis.