  The predictive properties of a retina are studied by measuring the mutual
information (MI) between its stimulation and the corresponding firing rates
while it is being probed by a train of short pulses with stochastic intervals.
Features of the measured MI at various time shifts between the stimulation and
the response are used to characterize the predictive properties of the retina.
By varying the statistical properties of the pulse train, our experiments show
that a retina has the ability to predict future events of the stimulation if
the information rate of the stimulation is low enough. Also, this predictive
property of the retina occurs at a time scale similar to the well established
anticipative phenomenon of omitted stimulus response in a retina. Furthermore,
a retina can make use of its predictive ability to distinguish between time
series created by an Ornstein--Uhlenbeck and a hidden Markovian process.
