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Science 3 December 1976:
Vol. 194. no. 4269, pp. 1077 - 1079
DOI: 10.1126/science.824735
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Articles

Science, Vol 194, Issue 4269, 1077-1079
Copyright © 1976 by American Association for the Advancement of Science

articles

Primate flicker sensitivity: psychophysics and electrophysiology

DH Kelly, RM Boynton, and WS Baron

A quantitative comparison is made between the psychophysical flicker response of man and similar data obtained electrophysiologically from the cones of macaque monkeys. When the psychophysical data are obtained from an eye that is strongly light-adapted, there is excellent agreement between the two sets of data at high frequencies. Under this condition, both kinds of data fit a distributed-parameter model, whose time constant also agrees with that derived from studies of the phosphenes elicited by electrical stimulation of the human eye. On the other hand, psychophysical data obtained with fully modulated stimuli (which minimally adapt the eye) yield a longer time constant for the same model. These results imply that the psychophysical flicker thresholds are normally controlled by a distributed filtering process that is proximal to the receptor stage. This slower, psychophysical process is evidently desensitized by intense adapting lights, so that the faster one that governs the electrophysiological responses can be detected.


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Eye Movements in Response to Dichoptic Motion: Evidence for a Parallel-Hierarchical Structure of Visual Motion Processing in Primates.
R. Hayashi, K. Miura, H. Tabata, and K. Kawano (2008)
J Neurophysiol 99, 2329-2346
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Neuronal Computation of Disparity in V1 Limits Temporal Resolution for Detecting Disparity Modulation.
H. Nienborg, H. Bridge, A. J. Parker, and B. G. Cumming (2005)
J. Neurosci. 25, 10207-10219
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Human flicker sensitivity: two stages of retinal diffusion.
D. Kelly and H. Wilson (1978)
Science 202, 896-899
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