Visual responses to stimulation at high temporal frequency are
generally considered to result from signals that avoid light adaptive gain
adjustment, simply reflecting linear summation of luminance. Under
conditions of high photopic illuminance, the center of the receptive field
of the cat X-cell has been shown to expand in size when stimulated at high
temporal frequency, raising the possibility that there is spatiotemporal
interaction in luminance summation. Here we show that this expansion
maintains constant the product of the center's luminance summing area
and the temporal period of luminance modulation, implying that spatial and
temporal integration of luminance can be traded for one another by the
X-cell center. As such the X-cell has a spatiotemporal window for
luminance integration that fuses the classical concepts of a spatial
window of luminance integration (Ricco's Law) with a temporal window
of luminance integration (Bloch's Law). We were interested to
determine whether this tradeoff between spatial and temporal summation of
luminance occurs also at lower light levels, where the temporal-frequency
bandwidth of the X-cell is narrower. We found that it does not. Center
radius does not expand with temporal frequency under either low photopic
or scotopic conditions. These results are discussed within the context of
the known retinal circuitry that underlies the X-cell center for photopic
and scotopic conditions.