[tofof]

So tired of defending against this same, old, completely wrong intuition from people especially those saying "do the science" to justify their ignorance instead of looking themselves since the science has already been done and it's coming up on a full century old.

From this one paper alone, humans can perceive information from a single frame at 2000 Hz.

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1945.9917254

Humans can read numbers and reproduce them immediately a 5 digit number is displayed for 1 frame at 400 fps. This is a single exposure, it is not a looping thing with persistence of vision or anything like that. 7 digit numbers required the framerate to be 333 fps. Another student produced 9 digit number from a single frame at 300 fps. These were the average results. The record results were a correct reproduction of a 7 digit number from a single viewing of a single frame at 2000 Hz. This was the limit within 2% accuracy of the tachistoscopic equipment in question. From the progression of the students chasing records, no slowing of their progression had ever been in sight. The later papers from this author involve considerable engineering difficulty to construct an even faster tachistocope and are limited by 1930s-1940s technology.

This research led the US Navy in WW2 to adopt tachistotopic training methods for aircraft recognition replacing the WEFT paradigm (which had approximately a 0% success rate) to a 1 frame at 75 fps paradigm which led to 95% of cadets reaching 80% accuracy on recognition, and 100% of cadets reaching 62.5% accuracy after just 50 sessions.

Yes, humans can see 2000 fps. Yes, humans can see well beyond 2000 fps in later work from this researcher.

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1945.9917254

Yes, humans can detect flicker well above 1000 fps in daily life at the periphery of vision with cone cells as cone cells can fire from a single photon of light and our edge detection circuits operate at a far higher frequency than our luminance and flicker-fusion circuits. Here's flicker being discriminated from steady light at an average of 2 kHz for 40 degree saccades, and an upper limit above 5 kHz during 20 degree saccades, which would be much more typical for eyes on a computer monitor.

There is no known upper limit to the frequency of human vision that is detectable. As far as I know, all studies (such as this one I link) have always been able to measure up to the reliable detection limit of their equipment, never up to a human limit.

[tofof]

Embarassingly, as I reread this 11 days later (wondering where I got a 20 point score bump from), I notice I once again said the exact opposite of cone and rod. I seem to be cursed to do this every time I mention them even though I am extremely well aware of the difference. The periphery and single-photon nature I was referring to are of course our low-light ROD cells, with color high-detail high-light-need cone cells at the fovea. So, for anyone in the future reading my comment, there's the first correction.

The second is that I didn't catch that my paste buffer dropped the same link in when I switch to talking about fusion flicker threshold during saccades. The specific paper I meant to link was this one, though there does not seem to be a fully public version available. Even so, discussions and citations of this paper and others are easy to find.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1477153512436367

I'm surprised neither error got caught at the time.

[Izkata]

> this same, old

I think the original claim got corrupted into what people argue about now: those lower fps were found to be roughly the border between perceiving something as smooth motion and jerky stop-motion (like claymation). Then someone misunderstood "smooth motion" to mean we can't perceive any better than that, and it started getting repeated incorrectly as the upper limit.

[chrisweekly]

Best comment in the threads, IMHO. Thanks for the details.

[sillysaurusx]

Agreed!