RESUMO
SIGNIFICANCE: Little is known about the perception of glaucomatous patients at large visual eccentricities. We show that the patients' performance drops beyond 40° eccentricity even for large images of scenes, suggesting that clinical tests should assess the patients' vision at larger eccentricities than 24 or 30°. PURPOSE: Daily activities such as visual search, spatial navigation, and hazard detection require rapid scene recognition on a wide field of view. We examined whether participants with visual field loss at standard automated perimetry 30-2 were able to detect target faces at large visual eccentricities. METHODS: Twelve patients with glaucoma and 14 control subjects were asked to detect a face in a two-alternative saccadic forced choice task. Pairs of scenes, one containing a face, were randomly displayed at 10, 20, 40, 60, or 80° eccentricity on a panoramic screen covering 180° horizontally. Participants were asked to detect and to saccade toward the scene containing a face. RESULTS: Saccade latencies were significantly slower in patients (264 milliseconds; confidence interval [CI], 222 to 306 milliseconds) than in control subjects (207 milliseconds; CI, 190 to 226 milliseconds), and accuracy was significantly lower in patients (70% CI, 65 to 85%) than in control subjects (75.7% CI, 71.5 to 79.5%). Although still significantly above chance at 60°, the patients' performance dropped beyond 40° eccentricity. The control subjects' performance was still above chance at 80° eccentricity. CONCLUSIONS: In patients with various degrees of peripheral visual field defect, performance dropped beyond 40° eccentricity for large images at a high contrast. This result could reflect reduced spread of exploration in glaucoma.