Absolute threshold

In neuroscience and psychophysics, an absolute threshold was originally defined as the lowest level of a stimulus – light, sound, touch, etc. – that an organism could detect. Under the influence of signal detection theory, absolute threshold has been redefined as the level at which a stimulus will be detected a specified percentage (often 50%) of the time. The absolute threshold can be influenced by several different factors, such as the subject's motivations and expectations, cognitive processes, and whether the subject is adapted to the stimulus. The absolute threshold can be compared to the difference threshold, which is the measure of how different two stimuli must be for the subject to notice that they are not the same. A landmark 1942 experiment by Hecht, Shlaer, and Pirenne assessed the absolute threshold for vision. They tried to measure the minimum number of photons the human eye can detect 60% of the time, using the following controls: Dark adaptation – the participants were completely dark adapted (a process lasting forty minutes) to optimise their visual sensitivity. Location – the stimulus was presented to an area of the right eye where there is a high density of rod cells, 20 degrees to the left of the point of focus (i.e. 20 degrees to the right of the fovea). Roughly this degree of eccentricity (about 20 degrees) has the highest rod density across the whole retina. However, the corresponding location on the right retina, 20 degrees to the left, is very near the blind spot. Stimulus size – the stimulus had a diameter of 10 minutes of arc (1 minute = 1/60th of a degree). Although not explicitly mentioned in the original research paper, this ensured that the light stimulus fell only on rod cells connected to the same nerve fibre (this is called the area of spatial summation). Wavelength – the stimulus wavelength matched the maximum sensitivity of rod cells (510 nm). Stimulus duration – 0.001 second (1 ms). The researchers found that the emission of only 5-14 photons could elicit visual experience.