Articlei-Perception
Ewald Hering's (1899) On the Limits of Visual Acuity: A Translation and Commentary: With a Supplement on Alfred Volkmann's (1863) Physiological Investigations in the Field of Optics.
Article in i-Perception. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sub-cone visual acuity can be achieved with less than 1 arcmin retinal slip.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Rappaport, Glisson, Hering, and Mall-Champions of Liver Microanatomy: Microscopic and Ultramicroscopic Anatomy of the Liver Into the Modern Age.Clinical liver disease · 2021Review
- Minimum perceivable size difference: how well can radiologists visually detect a change in lung nodule size from CT images?European radiology · 2021Article
- Visual Neuropsychology in Development: Anatomo-Functional Brain Mechanisms of Action/Perception Binding in Health and Disease.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Review
- The Clinical Use of Vernier Acuity: Resolution of the Visual Cortex Is More Than Meets the Eye.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Review
- Habitual higher order aberrations affect Landolt but not Vernier acuity.Journal of vision · 2019Article
- Hering Hermeneutics: Supplement toi-PerceptionArticle
- Seven Myths on Crowding and Peripheral Vision.i-PerceptionReview
- Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Towards the end of the 19th Century, Hering and Helmholtz were arguing about the fineness of visual acuity. In a talk given in 1899, Hering finally established beyond reasonable doubt that humans can see spatial displacements smaller than the diameter of a foveal cone receptor, an ability we nowadays call 'hyperacuity' and still the topic of active research. Hering suggested that this ability is made manifest by averaging across the range of locations stimulated during miniature eye movements. However, this idea was made most clear only in a footnote to this (not well known) publication of his talk and so was missed by many subsequent workers. Accordingly, particularly towards the end of the 20th Century, Hering has commonly been mis-cited as having proposed in this paper that averaging occurs purely along the lengths of the edges in the image. Here, we present in translation what Hering actually said and why. In Supplementary Material, we additionally translate accounts of some background experiments by Volkmann (1863) that were cited by Hering.
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