Spatial frequency response of a human eye apodized with the stiles crawford effect of the first kind in coherent illumination

A beam of light passing near the centre of the pupil of a human eye stimulates the retina more than an identical beam making an entry from the edges of the pupil. This is Stiles-Crawford effect of the first kind (SCE I). This diminution in the effective brightness of a beam is retinal in origin. But in the computation of how the human eye responds to different spatial frequencies in the object, often the SCE I is incorporated as a pupil apodization. We have shown here that in the absence of aberrations and defocus this response is predominantly governed by the coherence of the incident beam rather than the beam’s pupil entry point, a characteristic of the traditional Stiles Crawford effect.