Psychology : $b A study of mental lifeWoodworth, Robert Sessions
Science
Psychology : $b A study of mental life
Woodworth, Robert Sessions
Psychology
The muscle sense seems to become adapted to any fixed position of a
limb, so that, after the limb has remained motionless for some time,
you cannot tell in what position it is; to find out, you have only to
move it the least bit, which will excite both the muscle sense and the
cutaneous pressure sense. The sense of head rotation is adaptable, in
that a rotation which is keenly sensed at the start ceases to be felt
as it continues; but here it is not the sense cells that become
adapted, but the back flow that ceases, as will soon be explained.
To come now to the sense of sight, we have _light adaptation, dark
adaptation_, and _color adaptation_. Go into a dark room, and at first
all seems black, but by degrees--provided there is a little light
filtering into the room--you begin to see, for your retina is becoming
dark-adapted. Now go out into a bright place, and at first you are
"blinded", but you quickly "get used" to the bright illumination and
see objects much more distinctly than at first; for your eye has now
become light-adapted. Remain for some time in a room illuminated by a
colored light (as the yellowish light of most artificial illuminants),
and by degrees the color sensation bleaches out so that the light
appears nearly white.
Dark adaptation is equivalent to sensitizing the retina for faint
light. Photographic plates can be made of more or less sensitiveness
for use with different illuminations; but the retina automatically
alters its sensitivity to fit the illumination to which it is exposed.
{226}
Rod and Cone Vision
You will notice, in the dark room, that while you see light and shade
and the forms of objects, you do not see colors. The same is true out
of doors at night. In other words, the kind of vision that we have
when the eye is dark-adapted is totally color-blind. Another
significant fact is that the fovea is of little use in very dim light.
These facts are taken to mean that dim-light vision, or _twilight
vision_ as it is sometimes called, is _rod vision_ and not cone
vision; or, in other words, that the rods and not the cones have the
great sensitiveness to faint light in the dark-adapted eye. The cones
perhaps become somewhat dark-adapted, but the rods far outstrip them
in this direction. The fovea has no rods and hence is of little use in
very faint light. The rods have no differential responsiveness to
different wave-lengths, remaining still in the "first stage" in the
development of color vision, and consequently no colors are seen in
faint light.
Rod vision differs then from cone vision in having only one response
to every wave-length, and in adapting itself to much fainter light. No
doubt, also, it is the rods that give to peripheral vision its great
sensitivity to moving objects.
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