We present new psychophysical estimates of the size of the rod pool for bleaching adaptation in the human retina. We estimate that at 5 deg nasal eccentricity in the human retina the size of the adaptation pool for rods is between 5 and 7.5 min arc. This estimate is compatible with the extent of the dendritic spread of rod bipolars located in this region of the primate retina and with the area occupied by roughly 50 rods in this parafoveal region of the human retina. Thus a candidate for the site of adaptation is the bipolar cell whose receptive field is comprised of approx. 50 rods. These estimates represents the lowest measurements to date of the size of the adaptation pool for rods.

We investigated the spread of bleaching adaptation for human cone vision in the central fovea and at an eccentricity of 5 deg in the nasal retina. Cone thresholds measured after adaptation to a grating bleach were compared to those measured after a uniform bleach. We conclude that the foveal and parafoveal cone systems show excellent localization of the effects of adaptation. For areas 2.5-5 min removed from the bleach, our measurement show only small sensitivity losses amounting to between 0.10 and 0.25 log unit elevation in threshold, after taking account of optical scatter.

Recent successful robotic models of complex tasks are characterized by use of deictic primitives and frequent access to the sensory input. Such models require only limited memory representations, a well- known characteristic of human cognition. We show, using a sensori-motor copying task, that human performance is also characterized by deictic strategies and limited memory representations. This suggests that the deictic approach is afruitful one for under- standing human brain mechanisms; it also suggests a computational rationale for the limitations on human short term memory