Visual Adaptation in Monkey Cones: Recordings of Late Receptor Potentials

The retinal cones of cynomolgus macaque monkeys show marked amounts of adaptation when the receptor potential is elicited by brief incremental stimuli presented against steady backgrounds of increasing intensity. The results can be accounted for by mechanisms of response compression, modified by the effects of photopigment bleaching, which together set the gain of the system at each background level, while also making the response nearly linear over a significant range of intensities above and below that of each adapting stimulus.