Cone cell : Ask Biography

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Cone cells, or cones, are photoreceptor cells in the retina of the eye that are responsible for color vision; they function best in relatively bright light, as opposed to rod cells that work better in dim light. Cone cells are densely packed in the fovea, but gradually become sparser towards the periphery of the retina.

A commonly cited figure of six million in the human eye was found by Osterberg in 1935. Oyster's textbook (1999) cites work by Curcio et al. (1990) indicating an average closer to 4.5 million cone cells and 90 million rod cells in the human retina.

Cones are less sensitive to light than the rod cells in the retina (which support vision at low light levels), but allow the perception of color. They are also able to perceive finer detail and more rapid changes in images, because their response times to stimuli are faster than those of rods. Because humans usually have three kinds of cones with different photopsins, which have different response curves and thus respond to variation in color in different ways, they have trichromatic vision. Being color blind can change this, and there have been reports of people with four or more types of cones, giving them tetrachromatic vision.