Photochemical laws and visual phenomena

By measuring the course of recovery of visual sensitivity in the dark, after exposure to light, it has been demonstrated that all the phenomena of recovery can be explained—qualitatively—by the known fundamental principles of photochemistry. In particular, the reciprocity law, which is widely valid in photographic processes, only holds under certain limited circumstances for visual phenomena. In the case of foveal vision the reciprocity law does not hold, owing to the rapid recovery process, except for very brief periods of exposure. In the case of parafoveal vision the recovery process for the scotopic mechanism is sufficiently slow to allow validity of the reciprocity law over a wide range of exposure periods, although the law still breaks down for the parafoveal photopic mechanism. This circumscribed validity of the reciprocity law is of practical service in that the effect of many experimental conditions can be predicted from a very limited set of suitably chosen experimental data. It may be noted that it has not been found necessary to introduce any postulate involving recovery of the nervous transmission system as part of the recovery process.