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Updated: Feb 1, 2026

Measurement & Analysis of the Temporal Discrimination Threshold Applied to Cervical Dystonia
Published on: January 27, 2018
Evaluation of critical flicker-fusion frequency measurement methods using a touchscreen-based visual temporal
Yuichiro Nomura1, Shohei Ikuta2, Satoshi Yokota3
1Laboratory for Systems Neuroscience and Developmental Biology, College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, Shiga, 525-8577, Japan.
Abstract:
The critical flicker-fusion frequency (CFF), defined as the frequency at which a flickering light is indistinguishable from a continuous light, is a useful measure of visual temporal resolution. The mouse CFF has been studied by electrophysiological approaches such as recordings of the electroretinogram (ERG) and the visually evoked potential (VEP), but it has not been measured behaviorally. Here we estimated the mouse CFF by using a touchscreen based operant system. The test with ascending series of frequencies and that with randomized frequencies resulted in about 17 and 14 Hz, respectively, as the frequency which could not be distinguished from steady lights. Since the ascending method of limits tend to overestimate the threshold than the descending method, we estimated the mouse CFF to be about 14 Hz. Our results highlight usefulness of the operant conditioning method in measurement of the mouse visual temporal resolution.
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