Seeing is much harder at night: It has long been known that visual acuity is
much poorer and that colors fade completely. New experimental findings by
researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and the
University Eye Clinic in Tuebingen published in the April 8 issue of the journal
Nature show that moving objects appear slower, when viewed through the rod
photoreceptors of night vision than when viewed through the cone photoreceptors
of day vision.
Perceived speed for stimuli seen by the rod- (night-) vision system is
underestimated by about 25% compared to movement seen by the cone- (day-) vision
system. Analogously, cone stimuli are seen to move about 30% faster than a rod
stimulus of a given speed.
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In their experiments, two moving stimuli were presented to the observers. The
colors of the stimuli were carefully chosen so that one stimulus was only
visible to the cone photoreceptors and the other only to the rod photoreceptors.
Observers typically reported that the rod perceived stimulus appeared to move
slower than the stimulus perceived through the cones, although the two actually
moved at the same physical speed. To obtain a speed match between the rod and
cone perceived stimuli, the physical speed of the rod stimulus had to be
increased by about 25%. Since speed judgments by daylight (based on cone
photoreceptors) are known to be quite veridical, this implies that, under low
light conditions, observers underestimate the speed of moving objects.
When driving at night, the region illuminated by the headlights is
bright enough to activate cone photoreceptors, while the remaining visual field
is in the dark, and therefore seen by rod photoreceptors.
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The situation closely resembles the situation of driving at night. The center of
the visual field is illuminated by the bright headlights - and therefore seen by
cones, whereas the remaining visual scene, including the sides of the road, are
unlit and presumably processed by rods. This might lead to an underestimation of
the speed of our movement through the environment, which in turn might elicit a
compensatory and possibly fatal speeding-up. It is now planned to use the
Virtual Reality setup at the Max Planck Institute to test this prediction under
more realistic settings.
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