Accommodation for flickering stimuli.

A laser optometer was used to measure accommodative responses of three observers for sinusoidal gratings presented in Maxwellian view at optical distances ranging from 0 to 4 diopters. Contrast of the stimuli was modulated spatially at 1.0, 4.2 and 6.5 cycles deg.-1 (cpd), and temporally at six frequencies ranging from 3.0 to 40 Hz. Accommodation was consistently more accurate for the 4.2 cpd than for either the 1.0 or 6.5 cpd gratings. Furthermore, accommodative responsiveness for the 4.2 cpd was not affected by temporal modulation, while that for the other spatial frequencies improved monotonically as a function of temporal frequency. These results reinforce earlier reports that accommodation is most responsive for contrast of intermediate spatial frequencies and they indicate that stimulus flicker generally degrades accommodation for spatial contrast.