Development of pupillary responses to grating stimuli

Abstract Pupillary responses to stationary, achromatic sine wave gratings were measured in adults and in 1- and 3-month-old infants. Measurements of behaviourally determined contrast sensitivity were also obtained from the infant subjects. Contrast sensitivity functions were typical of those previously described: band-pass in nature with sensitivity increasing markedly with age. The pupil grating response amplitudes also exhibited a spatial frequency and age dependence similar to that observed for contrast sensitivity. These findings provide further evidence that the neural mechanisms which underlie visual sensitivity to contrast also mediate pupillary responses to spatial structure.