Response of the human eye to spatially sinusoidal gratings at various exposure durations

Abstract The shapes of human spatial contrast sensitivity functions for sinusoidal luminance patterns are strongly dependent upon exposure duration, exhibiting a linear low frequency decline of threshold for long exposures and no decline for brief exposures. This result confirms earlier work with square-wave patterns but conflicts with some sine-wave experiments. The results can be interpreted as indicating that narrow-band spatial channels at low spatial frequencies are approximately equal in sensitivity when temporal properties of the mechanisms are taken into account. They also have bearing upon models for the Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet phenomenon.

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