A physiological phenomenon and its implications for lighting design

Abstract

Understanding of the processes and mechanisms of vision has advanced enormously in recent years. Despite this, there are only tenuous links between current lighting design practice and visual science. This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs since, at face value, lighting design should seek to optimise the performance of the visual system. This paper describes an experiment investigating changes in response time of subjects detecting movement of a pointer, with decreasing adaptation luminance. A physiological explanation of the results is suggested and the implications for lighting design are discussed.