to measure and see how acuity deteriorates as the
stimulus is moved farther from the fovea
to develop some understanding of what is an
experiment
To begin to learn how to design an experiment to
answer a question
to compare data to hypothesis
Acuity and Retinal Physiology
From class and chapter 3 of the text, we learn
that the number of cones get fewer as the distance
from the fovea increases.
Observations:
Since we will be testing in the day time, it
is the cones that are the principal receptors
involved in what we see
The density of cones is by far the greatest in
the fovea
It has also been observed that receptive
fields are smaller at the fovea than in the
periphery
Acuity and receptive fields are examples of
spatial summation so should be linked
Question: It would seem that if the density of the
cones is greatest in the fovea and the receptive
fields are smallest in the fovea that our acuity
would be highest at the fovea and decrease in the
periphery.
Experiments
Scientist use many types of methods to collect
their data.
One type of research method unique to the sciences
is the experiment.
In simple terms that means the research changes
something and sees what happens. I will
introduce a lot of formal language, but that is the
basic idea, hold onto it.
The thing that the experimenter changes is called
the Independent Variable (IV).
The thing that the experimenter measures to see
what happened is the dependent variable (DV)
See if you can figure out the IV and DV for this
experiment.