The visual acuity of the frog (Rana pipiens)

The frog's visual acuity for gratings was tested with a two-choice prey-dummy setup. The two dummies had a constant position in the visual field, but in one of them a striped pattern was constantly drifting, while the other was a potentially less attention arousing dummy with non-moving stripes. The acuity was tested in bright white light and with different brightness levels of green light (500 nm). The highest acuity 2.8 cycles per degree was achieved with the maximum level of green light. When the brightness was lowered by six orders of magnitude the acuity fell to 0.7 cycles per degree. These behavioural acuities are compared with a theoretically calculated resolving power of the retinal ganglion cell array.