Specificity of cone mechanisms in lateral interaction.

1. The increment threshold for a brief, small probing light flash was used as an indicator of the state of adaptation of the human fovea. It shows that illumination of a zone up to 7 min of arc in diameter desensitizes the retina and that the additional illumination of a surrounding zone acts to counteract the desensitization.2. The red and green colour mechanisms were isolated by selecting light of appropriate wave-lengths for the adaptation and the increment stimuli and it was demonstrated that the desensitizing and sensitizing adaptation zones exist within each mechanism.3. Using the constancy of the increment threshold for a brief, small probing flash as a null-indicator for equivalence of annuli of various wave-lengths to produce a given amount of sensitization, the action spectrum for the laterally interacting region was obtained for both the red and the green mechanisms.4. For the red mechanism, the surrounding sensitizing zone has the action spectrum also of the red mechanism. For the green mechanism the surrounding sensitizing zone has a green action spectrum.