What is an example of the fovea?

Fovea: In the eye, a tiny pit located in the macula of the retina that provides the clearest vision of all. Only in the fovea are the layers of the retina spread aside to let light fall directly on the cones, the cells that give the sharpest image.

Which animals have a fovea?

The fovea is also a pit in the surface of the retinas of many types of fish, reptiles, and birds. Among mammals, it is found only in simian primates.

What is the fovea packed with?

The human fovea is densely packed with cones. It looks like a little pit on the retina because the cells that are above the retinal surface, such as retinal ganglion cells, horizontal cells, and amacrine cells, are swept away so that the cones are at the surface.

What is the function of the fovea?

Structure and Function The fovea centralis is located in the center of the macula lutea, a small, flat spot located exactly in the center of the posterior portion of the retina. As the fovea is responsible for high-acuity vision it is densely saturated with cone photoreceptors.

How many fovea do we have?

Total Number of Cones in Fovea approximately 200,000. 17,500 cones/degree2. Rod-free area is 1°; thus, there are 17,500 cones in the central rod-free fovea.

Why are there no rods in the fovea?

In the fovea, there are NO rods… only cones. The cones are also packed closer together here in the fovea than in the rest of the retina. Also, blood vessels and nerve fibers go around the fovea so light has a direct path to the photoreceptors.

How many types of fovea are there?

The mature human fovea consists of 3 spectral types of cone: red or long wavelength sensitive cones, L-cones; green or medium wavelength cones, or M-cones; and blue or short wavelength cones, S-cones.

What structure in the eye is responsible for the physiological blind spot?

Blind spot, small portion of the visual field of each eye that corresponds to the position of the optic disk (also known as the optic nerve head) within the retina. There are no photoreceptors (i.e., rods or cones) in the optic disk, and, therefore, there is no image detection in this area.

How is the pit of the fovea characterized?

The walls of the pit form the foveal slope which is characterized histologically by having a GCL which goes from no cells near the foveola to a GCL up to eight cells deep on the edge of the fovea. Cone density is lower than in the foveola, and cones are thicker. Rods are present at low density in the fovea (Figure 2 (b), R).

What kind of pigment is in the fovea?

The fovea is covered in a yellow pigment called xanthophyll, with the carotenoids zeaxanthin and lutein (Balashov and Bernstein, 1998), present in the cone axons of the Henle fibre layer. The pigment area absorbs blue light and is probably an evolutionary adaptation to the problem of chromatic aberration .

Where are the parafovea and the perifovea located?

Approximately half the nerve fibers in the optic nerve carry information from the fovea, while the remaining half carry information from the rest of the retina. The parafovea extends to a radius of 1.25 mm from the central fovea, and the perifovea is found at a 2.75 mm radius from the fovea centralis.

Which is the outermost region of the fovea?

The fovea is surrounded by the parafovea belt, and the perifovea outer region: the parafovea is the intermediate belt where the ganglion cell layer is composed of more than five rows of cells; the perifovea is the outermost region where the ganglion cell layer contains two to four rows of cells, and is where visual acuity is below the optimum.