What process does visual information undergo at the level of bipolar and ganglion cells in the eye?

The process that visual information undergoes at the level of bipolar and ganglion cells in the eye is primarily transduction. This term specifically refers to converting sensory stimuli—in this case, light photons—into electrical signals that can be interpreted by the brain. Photoreceptors in the retina initially absorb incoming light and initiate this transformation.

Once the light is converted into electrical signals, it passes through the retinal layers, including the bipolar cells, which serve as intermediaries between photoreceptors and ganglion cells. The ganglion cells then aggregate these signals and transmit them through their axons to the brain via the optic nerve.

While parallel and serial processing refer to how the brain handles and organizes information (with parallel processing involving simultaneous processing of multiple aspects of a stimulus and serial processing involving a step-by-step processing of information), they are not the primary mechanisms described at the level of the bipolar and ganglion cells themselves in terms of converting the light stimuli into neural signals. Encoding can refer to various methods of information representation, but does not specifically describe the process occurring at this stage of visual processing. Hence, transduction captures the essence of what occurs in these early stages of visual information processing.