It has been implied, in the comments on visual acuity, that the limiting factor is one of an anatomical arrangement of photoreceptors and of their neural organization. A very important feature, however, must be the accuracy of the formation of an image of external objects by the optical system of the eye. It may be calculated, for example, that the image of a grating produces lines 0.5 micron wide on the retina, but this is on the basis of ideal geometrical optics. In fact, the optics of the eye are not perfect, and diffraction of light by its passage through the pupil further spoils the image. As a result of these defects, the image of a black-and-white grating on the retina is not sharp, the black lines being not completely black but gray because of spread of light from the white lines. (When the optical system of the eye is defective, moreover, as in nearsightedness, or myopia, the imagery is worse, but this can be corrected by the use of appropriate lenses.) Physiologically, the eye effectively improves the retinal image by enhancing contrasts. Thus, the image of a fine black line on a white background formed on the retina is not a sharply defined black line but a relatively wide band of varying degrees of grayness, yet, to the observer, the line appears sharply defined. This is because of lateral inhibition: the photoreceptors that receive the most light tend to inhibit those that receive less. The result is a physiological “sharpening of the image,” so that the eye often behaves as though the image were perfect. This applies to chromatic aberration too, which should cause black-and-white objects to appear fringed with colour, yet, because of suppression of the chromatic responses, one is not aware of the coloured fringes that do in effect surround the images of objects in the external world.

The iris behaves as a diaphragm, modifying the amount of light entering the eye. Probably of greater significance than control of the light entering the eye is the influence on aberrations of the optical system. In general, the smaller the pupil, the less serious the aberrations. The smaller the pupil, however, the more serious the effects of diffraction become, so that a balance must be struck. Experimentally, it is found that, at high luminances with pupils below 3 mm (0.12 inch) in diameter, the visual acuity is not improved by further reduction of the diameter; increasing the pupil size beyond this reduces acuity, presumably because of the greater optical aberrations. It is interesting that when a subject is placed in a room that is darkened steadily, the size of the pupil increases, and the size attained for any given level of luminance is, in fact, optimal for visual acuity at this particular luminance. The reason that visual acuity increases with the larger pupils is that the extra light admitted into the eye compensates for the increased aberrations.

When the gaze is fixed intently on an object for a long time, peripheral images that tend to disappear reappear immediately when the eyes are moved. This effect is called the Troxler phenomenon. To study it reproducibly, it is necessary to use an optical device that ensures that the image of any object upon which the gaze is fixed will remain on the same part of the retina however the eyes move. When this is achieved, the stabilized retinal image tends to fade within a few seconds. It may be assumed that in normal vision the normal involuntary movements—the microsaccades and drifts mentioned earlier—keep the retinal image in sufficient movement to prevent the fading. This is essentially an example of sensory adaptation, the tendency for any receptive system to cease responding to a maintained stimulus.

Neurological basis

Subjective studies on humans can traverse only a certain distance in the interpretation of visual phenomena; beyond this the standard electrophysiological techniques, which have been successful in unravelling the mechanisms of the central nervous system, must be applied to the eye; this, as repeatedly emphasized, is an outgrowth of the brain.

Records from single optic nerve fibres of the frog and from the ganglion cell of the mammalian retina indicated three types of response. In the frog there were fibres that gave a discharge when a light was switched on the “on-fibres.” Another group, the “off-fibres,” remained inactive during illumination of the retina but gave a powerful discharge when the light was switched off. A third group, the “on-off fibres,” gave discharges at “on” and “off” but were inactive during the period of illumination. The responses in the mammal were similar but more complex than in the frog. The mammalian retina shows a background of activity in the dark, so that on- and off-effects are manifest as accentuations or diminutions of this normal discharge. In general, on-elements gave an increased discharge when the light was switched on and an inhibition of the background discharge when the light was switched off. An off-element showed inhibition of the background discharge during illumination and a powerful discharge at off; this off-discharge is thus a release of inhibition and reveals unmistakably the inhibitory character of the response to illumination that takes place in some ganglion cells. Each ganglion cell or optic nerve fibre tested had a receptive field, and the area of frog’s retina from which a single fibre could be activated varied with the intensity of the light stimulus. The largest field was obtained with the strongest stimulus, so that, in order for a light stimulus falling some distance from the centre of the field to affect this particular fibre, it had to be much more intense than a light stimulus falling on the centre of the field. This means that some synaptic pathways are more favoured than others.

The mammalian receptive field is more complex, with the peripheral part of the field giving the opposite type of response compared with that given by the centre. Thus, if at the centre of the field, the response was “on” (an on-centre field), the response to a stimulus farther away in the same fibre was “off,” and in an intermediate zone it was often mixed to give an on-off element. In order to characterize an element, therefore, it must be called on-centre or off-centre, with the meaning thereby that at the centre of its receptive field its response was “on” or “off,” respectively, while in the periphery it was opposite. By studying the effects of small spot stimuli on centre and periphery separately and together, a mutual inhibition is found between the two. A striking feature is the effect of adaptation. After dark adaptation, the surrounding area of opposite activity becomes ineffective. In this sense, therefore, the receptive field shrinks, but, as it is a reduction in inhibitory activity between centre and periphery, it means, in fact, that the effective field—i.e., the regions over which summation can occur—can actually increase during dark adaptation, and this is exactly what is found in psychophysical experiments on dark adaptation.

Anatomical basis

The receptive field is essentially a measure of the number of photoreceptors—rods or cones or a mixture of these—that make nervous connections with a single ganglion cell. The organization of centre and periphery implies that the photoreceptors in the periphery of an on-centre cell tend to inhibit it, while those in the centre of the field tend to excite it, so that the effects of a uniform illumination covering the whole field tend to cancel out. This has an important physiological value, as it means, in effect, that the brain is not bombarded with an enormous number of unnecessary messages, as would be the case were every ganglion cell to send discharges along its optic nerve fibre as long as it was illuminated. Instead, the cell tends to respond to change—i.e., the movement of a light or dark spot over the receptive field—and to give an especially prominent response, often when the spot passes from the periphery to the centre or vice versa. Thus, the centre-periphery organization favours the detection of movement. In a similar way, it favours the detection of contours, because these give rise to differences in the illumination of the parts of the receptive fields. The anatomical basis of the arrangement presumably is given by the organization of the bipolar and amacrine cells in relation to the dendrites of the ganglion cell; it is interesting that the actual diameter of the centre of the receptive field of a ganglion cell is frequently equal to the area over which its dendrites spread. The periphery exerts its effects presumably by means of amacrine cells that are capable of connecting with bipolars over a wide area. These amacrine cells could exert an inhibitory action on the bipolar cells connected to the photoreceptors of the central zone of the field, preventing them from responding to these photoreceptors; in this case, the ganglion cell related to these bipolars would be of an on-centre and off-periphery type.

Direction-sensitive ganglion cells

When examining the receptive fields of rabbit ganglion cells, investigators found some that gave a maximal response when a moving spot of light passed in a certain “preferred” direction, while they gave no response at all when the spot passed in the opposite direction; in fact, the spontaneous activity of the cell was usually inhibited by this movement in the “null” direction. It may be assumed that the photoreceptors connected with this type of ganglion cell are organized in a linear fashion, so that the stimulation of one photoreceptor causes inhibition of a photoreceptor adjacent to it. This inhibition would prevent the excitatory effect of light on the adjacent photoreceptor from having a response when the movement was in the null direction, but it would arrive too late at the adjacent photoreceptor if the light were moving in the preferred direction.

The electroretinogram

If an electrode is placed on the cornea and another, indifferent electrode is placed, for example, in the mouth, illumination of the retina is followed by a succession of electrical changes; the record of these is the electroretinogram, or ERG. Modern analysis has shown that the electrode on the cornea picks up changes in potential occurring successively at different levels of the retina, so that it is now possible to recognize, for example, the electrical changes occurring in the rods and cones—the photoreceptor potentials—those occurring in the horizontal cells, and so on. In general, the electrical changes caused by the different types of cell tend to overlap in time, so that the record in the electroretinogram is only a faint and attenuated index to the actual changes; nevertheless, it has, in the past, been a most valuable tool for the analysis of retinal mechanisms. Thus, the most prominent wave—called the b-wave—is closely associated with discharge in the optic nerve, so that in humans and other animals the height of the b-wave can be used as an objective measure of the response to light. Hence, the sensitivity of the dark-adapted frog’s retina to different wavelengths, as indicated by the heights of the b-waves, can be plotted against wavelength to give a typical scotopic sensitivity curve, with a maximum at 5000 angstroms (1 angstrom = 1 × 10⁻⁴ micron) corresponding to the maximum for absorption of rhodopsin.

Flicker

Electrophysiology has been used as a tool for the examination of the basic mechanism of flicker and fusion. The classical studies based on the electroretinogram indicated that the important feature that determines fusion in the cone-dominated retina is the inhibition of the retina caused by each successive light flash, inhibition being indicated by the a-wave of the electroretinogram. In the rod-dominated retina—e.g., in humans under scotopic conditions—the a-wave is not prominent, and fusion depends simply on the tendency for the excitatory response to a flash to persist, the inhibitory effects of a succeeding stimulus being small. More modern methods of analysis, in which the discharges in single ganglion cells in response to repeated flashes are measured, have defined fairly precisely the nature of fusion, which, so far as the retinal message is concerned, is a condition in which the record from the ganglion cell becomes identical to the record observed in the ganglion cell during spontaneous discharge during constant illumination.

Visual acuity

Although the resolving power of the retina depends, in the last analysis, on the size and density of packing of the photoreceptors in the retina, it is the neural organization of the photoreceptors that determines whether the brain will be able to make use of this theoretical resolving power. It is therefore of interest to examine the responses of retinal ganglion cells to gratings, either projected as stationary images onto the receptive field or moved slowly across it. One group of investigators showed that ganglion cells of the cat differed in sensitivity to a given grating when the sensitivity was measured by the degree of contrast between the black and white lines of the grating necessary to evoke a measurable response in a ganglion cell. When the lines were made very fine (i.e., the “grating-frequency” was high), a point was reached at which the ganglion cell failed to respond, however great the contrast; this measured the resolving power of the particular cell being investigated. The interesting feature of this work is that individual ganglion cells had a special sensitivity to particular grating-frequencies, as if the ganglion cells were “tuned” to particular frequencies, the frequencies being measured by the number of black and white lines in a given area of retina. When the same technique was applied to human subjects, the electrical changes recorded from the scalp being taken as a measure of the response, the same results were obtained.