Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Brief Communication
  • Published:

The relationship between visual resolution and cone spacing in the human fovea

Nature Neuroscience volume 13, pages 156–157 (2010)Cite this article

Abstract

Visual resolution decreases rapidly outside of the foveal center. The anatomical and physiological basis for this reduction is unclear. We used simultaneous adaptive optics imaging and psychophysical testing to measure cone spacing and resolution across the fovea, and found that resolution was limited by cone spacing only at the foveal center. Immediately outside of the center, resolution was worse than cone spacing predicted and better matched the sampling limit of midget retinal ganglion cells.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Cone-stimulation map for subject S3.
Figure 2: Visual resolution matches the Nyquist limit of the mRGC mosaic but not the cone Nyquist limit.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Green, D.G. J. Physiol. (Lond.) 207, 351–356 (1970).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Enoch, J.M. & Hope, G.M. Doc. Ophthalmol. 34, 143–156 (1973).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Williams, D.R. & Coletta, N.J. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 4, 1514–1523 (1987).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Thibos, L.N., Cheney, F.E. & Walsh, D.J. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 4, 1524–1529 (1987).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Marcos, S. & Navarro, R. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A Opt. Image Sci. Vis. 14, 731–740 (1997).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Curcio, C.A. & Allen, K.A. J. Comp. Neurol. 300, 5–25 (1990).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  7. Dacey, D.M. J. Neurosci. 13, 5334–5355 (1993).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Polyak, S.L. The Retina (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1941).

  9. Curcio, C.A., Sloan, K.R., Kalina, R.E. & Hendrickson, A.E. J. Comp. Neurol. 292, 497–523 (1990).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Roorda, A. et al. Opt. Express 10, 405–412 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Liang, J., Williams, D.R. & Miller, D.T. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A Opt. Image Sci. Vis. 14, 2884–2892 (1997).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  12. Rossi, E.A., Weiser, P., Tarrant, J. & Roorda, A. J. Vis. 7, 1–14 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Bland, J.M. & Altman, D.G. Lancet 1, 307–310 (1986).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  14. Anderson, R.S. & Thibos, L.N. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A Opt. Image Sci. Vis. 16, 2334–2342 (1999).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  15. Drasdo, N., Millican, C.L., Katholi, C.R. & Curcio, C.A. Vision Res. 47, 2901–2911 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank K. Grieve for her assistance with data collection and P. Tiruveedhula for his help on software development. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Adaptive Optics under cooperative agreement AST-9876783 managed by the University of California, Santa Cruz and by National Institutes of Health grant EY014375.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vision Science Graduate Group, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

    Ethan A Rossi & Austin Roorda

  2. School of Optometry, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

    Austin Roorda

Authors
  1. Ethan A Rossi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Austin Roorda
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

E.A.R. designed and performed the experiments, analyzed the data, and wrote the manuscript. A.R. supervised the project and edited the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ethan A Rossi.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

Austin Roorda holds the patent Method and Apparatus for Using Adaptive Optics in a Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope, which has been assigned to the University of Houston and the University of Rochester. The patent covers both the imaging and stimulus delivery applications of the technology described in this paper.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–3, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Discussion (PDF 379 kb)

Supplementary Video 1

AOSLO video showing retinal imagery and stimulus delivery. This video shows a tumbling E stimulus being delivered to the retina of observer S3. Cone photoreceptors appear as bright circles arranged in a roughly triangular lattice pattern. The motion of the retinal mosaic is due to normal fixational eye movements. This video has been processed in the following way: sinusoidal distortion caused by raster scanning was removed10,12,16; the aspect ratio was corrected to be 1:1; the video was cropped to be 0.75° × 0.75°. Although the stimulus appears quite sharp, this is due to the fact that the stimulus is delivered by modulating the imaging beam to be off. What the observer sees is a stimulus that is blurred by diffraction and any residual high-order optical aberrations that exist after adaptive optics correction. (AVI 6065 kb)

Supplementary Video 2

Stabilized AOSLO video. Video 2 shows a stabilized version of video 1. This video was stabilized using custom algorithms20 and illustrates how the normal fixational movements of the eye cause the stimulus to move across several photoreceptors over the course of a one second trial (30 frames). Stabilized videos such as these were averaged to produce the high signal to noise ratio images images which were used to build continuous maps of the photoreceptor mosaic for all individuals across test locations. Motion traces obtained through stabilization were used to determine the precise location of stimuli presented to the retina for resolution testing and for creating stimulation maps such as the one shown in Fig. 1. (AVI 6065 kb)

Supplementary Video 3

Animation showing modeled cone-stimulus interaction. This animation illustrates how cone models were used to examine the interaction between the stimulus and the photoreceptor mosaic. This video shows the cone-stimulus interaction that occurred during the trial shown in videos 1 & 2. This animation only shows a subsection of the area shown in videos 1 and 2; scale bar shows size relations. The left panel shows how the convolved stimulus moved across the cone mosaic, while the right panel shows the simulated cone interactions. The stimulus edges are enhanced (brightened) in the left panel to clearly illustrate where the contrast in the image fell to 50% of maximum. The color bar indicates the relative level of stimulation integrated over the course of the presentation for each cone. The change in color from blue to red as cones are stimulated over the course of the presentation illustrates how cone stimulation maps such as Fig. 1 were created. (MOV 200 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Rossi, E., Roorda, A. The relationship between visual resolution and cone spacing in the human fovea. Nat Neurosci 13, 156–157 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2465

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2465

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing