Fifty years of dark adaptation 1961-2011

This review celebrates the adaptation studies published in Vision Research during the past half a century, and it is thus a complement to the anniversary issues which are focusing on more recent work (Vision Research, 51(7 and 8), 2011). Throughout the text, the discussion often starts out from a work presented in Vision Research, but the discussion is not restricted by the journals used for publication. To date, in Vision Research alone, around 500 papers related to light/dark adaptation have been published; this review tries to follow up just a few discussions within the field of vertebrate dark adaptation. The main topics are: (1) the legacies of Wald and Barlow; (2) the Dowling-Rushton relation between regenerated rhodopsin and log threshold; (3) the mechanisms behind fast cone-driven and slow rod-driven dark adaptation; and (4) the role of the decomposition products of photoactivated rhodopsin. This review, and the scientists given leading roles in the story, have been guided by an interest in visual psychophysics, combined with a conviction that we need a thorough understanding of the information processing carried out by the photoreceptors and the neural retina for obtaining a correct understanding of the further analysis performed by the brain.