Effects of stimulus intensity and duration on photoresponses of single rods in the frog retina.

Electrical responses to light flashes were recorded from single red rods in dark-adapted retinas of the bullfrog, Rana catesbeiana. When the flashes were less than or equal to 50 ms in duration, plots of the peak amplitude of the responses as a function of log stimulus intensity were found to be parallel, and the stimulus intensity and duration required to elicit criterion-amplitude responses showed a linear relation with a negative unit slope. Furthermore the waveforms of equal-amplitude responses to flashes of different intensities and durations were superimposable. With increases in the stimulus duration beyond 50 ms, however, the slopes of the response-log intensity curves for the higher stimulus intensities decreased, the slope of curves describing the intensity required to elicit criterion responses became less negative, and the responses of the rods decayed more slowly. These results indicate that within 50 ms after the onset of flash stimuli, the effect of incident photons summate linearly to evoke rod responses of certain sub-saturating amplitudes when assessed in terms of the peak response amplitude as well as the response waveform.