SMPTE Commemorative Paper the First Recipient of the Society's Journal Award — 1934: An Introduction to the Experimental Study of Visual Fatigue

Previous work has shown that fatigue of the visual process as a whole is not directly measurable; it is therefore necessary to adopt the alternative method of studying the individual processes involved in vision. An analysis of the studies so far made on these unit functions shows that the motor processes involved are not readily fatigued; ineffective activity of these processes, however, rapidly leads to sensations of fatigue. This activity results from inadequate sensory projection, whether the inadequacy is a result of difficult external seeing conditions or of decreased efficiency of the retinal processes. Experiments were performed which showed that (1) the effective intensity of a given stimulus was affected considerably by the previous activity of the retina; (2) contrasts, and especially flicker, produced a marked retinal fatigue; (3) the site of this fatigue lay in the retinal structures behind the sense endings rather than in the sense endings themselves. It is concluded that retinal fatigue contributes a larger factor to visual fatigue than has hitherto been supposed; as long as the visual task is such that the factors producing a decrease in retinal efficiency are minimal, as is not usually the case in viewing the motion picture, visual fatigue will not supervene with unusual rapidity.

Print ISSN

0036-1682

Published

1991-01

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/J02096