Lateral Inhibition in the Retina as non-behavioral inhibition?
I wonder. The cells to be inhibited are all known in advance, as is the case in neuromuscular junctions. And that is a major hurdle that inhibition of non-behavioral processes has to take and the problem that has to be solved before anything else. Not the inhibitory processes themselves are at stake here, I assume that they have been explained fairly adequately, but the determination of their targets.
I suppose that retinal lateral inhibition at least teaches us that there is a more general property of inhibitory processes than the behavioral aspect. The target must be known in advance.

[That inhibition has always been analyzed in the context of behavior and reflexes is confirmed by the respective Nobel lectures of Sherrington ("Inhibition as a Coordinative Factor",1932) and Eccles ("The Ionic Mechanism of Postsynaptic Inhibition", 1963)]