Abstract
Following the psychophysical studies of Hecht, Shlaer and Pirenne (1942) and van der Velden (1944), which involved the reporting by a dark-adapted human observer of his seeing a light stimulus, it has been generally accepted that the visual mechanism is capable under certain conditions of detecting a small number (less than 15) of photons absorbed in the retina. The only question that has arisen is over the precise number of photons within the range 2 to 15. Consideration of the experimental methods employed in these studies suggests that the threshold number of photons required to activate the visual mechanism is 5. In the experimental situation this corresponds to the mean number absorbed in the retina to cause the light flash to be seen in 60% of a large number of trials. The number of photons absorbed in individual trials necessarily fluctuates according to a Poisson distribution and it was shown in these studies that the major source of fluctuation in seeing the stimulus was due to this fluctuation in the light stimulus rather than in the visual detecting mechanism. The maximum duration of stimulus for constant threshold is about 100 msec and the maximum spatial extent amounts to a circular region in the visual field with a diameter of about 0.3 of a degree. The latter corresponds to 2 an area of retina of about 0.004 mm2 within which there are present about 500 rod receptors (Fig. 1).
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Falk, G., Fatt, P. (1974). Limitations to Single-Photon Sensitivity in Vision. In: Conrad, M., Güttinger, W., Dal Cin, M. (eds) Physics and Mathematics of the Nervous System. Lecture Notes in Biomathematics, vol 4. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-80885-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-80885-2_8
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