Fig. 11. Size and shape of three chief types of retinal ganglion cells (cat), as described by Boycott and Wässle in 1974. All drawings are to the same scale, shown at the lower edge. The numbers given for each cell indicate its distance from the center of the central area of the retina. Alpha cells correspond to Y or “brisk-transient” cells (left), beta cells to X or “brisk-sustained” (middle), and gamma cells to W or “sluggish” cells of other terminologies (right). Note that the dendritic trees of the alpha and beta cells increase in size with eccentricity, but those of the gamma cells do not. The dendritic configurations differ markedly among the three groups of cells and are much smaller in beta cells than in alpha and gamma cells. (Boycott BB, Wässle H: The morphological types of ganglion cells of the domestic cat's retina. J Physiol 240:397, 1974)