Monocular steady-state accommodation was measured to harmonically related complex grating patterns and their components to determine the contribution of the various spatial waveforms to accommodative accuracy. Accommodative accuracy was greater for those waveforms containing summed odd-harmonic spatial components than for those waveforms with specific spatial components either removed or isolated. The results suggest that the contrast gradient produced by the summed waveforms, rather than the presence of any particular subset of spatial frequency components per se, was a critical factor for accurate accommodation.