Browsing by Subject "behavioural experiment"

At visual threshold, the vision relies on catching incident photons. The ultimate limitation of visual sensitivity arises from the quantal nature of light. At night, the uncertainty of photon arrivals differs fundamentally from daylight conditions, where photon flow can be considered continuous, and sets an absolute physical limitation to visual sensitivity. Visual sensitivity has been postulated to be affected by circadian physiological changes. Here, we have shown, that absolute visual sensitivity is under circadian control in light decrement, or quantal shadow, detection in mice. A behavioural visual task of finding a dark stimulus spot was conducted in a white water maze across several background light intensities leading gradually from clearly visible light to darkness. The percentage of correct choices in the task as a function of light intensity was used to measure visual sensitivity, which was remarkably higher nocturnally. Another parameter affecting visual sensitivity was shown to be the decrement size. Mice were more successful in finding the bigger decrements of the three spatial scales used, as well as succeeding in the task better at night. This finding suggests that visual sensitivity is affected by the absolute number of photons, or more precisely, the absolute number of missing photons in contrast to photons of the background illumination.