Saturation Revealed by Clamping the Gain of the Retinal Light Response

The saturation nonlinearity of the retinal light response in human was measured by a psychophysical technique in which the adaptive gain control mechanism was clamped by the presence of a fixed surround in a small (7') foveal test field. Gain clamping was established by showing that the normal variation in temporal summation properties with test intensity was abolished in the gain clamping paradigm. The static saturation function constructed from the increment/decrement asymmetries around a range of base intensities was shown to conform more closely to the Naka-Rushton hyperbolic saturation equation than to three other candidate nonlinearities.