A paradigm for characterizing motion misperception in people with typical vision and low vision.

PURPOSE: We aimed to develop a paradigm that can efficiently characterize motion percepts in people with low vision and compare their responses with well-known misperceptions made by people with typical vision when targets are hard to see. METHODS: We recruited a small cohort of individuals with reduced acuity and contrast sensitivity (n = 5) as well as a comparison cohort with typical vision (n = 5) to complete a psychophysical study. Study participants were asked to judge the motion direction of a tilted rhombus that was either high or low contrast. In a series of trials, the rhombus oscillated vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Participants indicated the perceived motion direction using a number wheel with 12 possible directions, and statistical tests were used to examine response biases. RESULTS: All participants with typical vision showed systematic misperceptions well predicted by a Bayesian inference model. Specifically, their perception of vertical or horizontal motion was biased toward directions orthogonal to the long axis of the rhombus. They had larger biases for hard-to-see (low contrast) stimuli. Two participants with low vision had a similar bias, but with no difference between high- and low-contrast stimuli. The other participants with low vision were unbiased in their percepts or biased in the opposite direction. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that some people with low vision may misperceive motion in a systematic way similar to people with typical vision. However, we observed large individual differences. Future work will aim to uncover reasons for such differences and identify aspects of vision that predict susceptibility.

Visual Axis and Stiles-Crawford Effect Peak Show a Positional Correlation in Normal Eyes: A Cohort Study.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to locate the visual axis and evaluate its correlation with the Stiles-Crawford effect (SCE) peak. Methods: Ten young, healthy individuals (20 eyes) were enrolled. An optical system was developed to locate the visual axis and measure SCE. To locate the visual axis, 2 small laser spots at 450 nm and 680 nm were co-aligned and delivered to the retina. The participants were asked to move a translatable pinhole until these spots were perceived to overlap each other. The same system assessed SCE at 680 nm using a bipartite, 2-channel (reference and test) Maxwellian-view optical system. The peak positions were estimated using a two-dimensional Gaussian fitting function and correlated with the visual axis positions. Results: Both the visual axis (x = 0.24 ± 0.35 mm, y = -0.16 ± 0.34 mm) and the SCE peak (x = 0.27 ± 0.35 mm, y = -0.15 ± 0.31 mm) showed intersubject variability among the cohort. The SCE peak positions were highly correlated in both the horizontal and vertical meridians to the visual axes (R2 = 0.98 and 0.96 for the x and y coordinates, respectively). Nine of the 10 participants demonstrated mirror symmetry for the coordinates of the visual axis and the SCE peak between the eyes (R2 = 0.71 for the visual axis and 0.76 for the SCE peak). Conclusions: The visual axis and SCE peak locations varied among the participants; however, they were highly correlated with each other for each individual. These findings suggest a potential mechanism underlying the foveal cone photoreceptor alignment.

Suprathreshold Contrast Perception Is Altered by Long-term Adaptation to Habitual Optical Blur.

Purpose: To investigate whether visual experience with habitual blur alters the neural processing of suprathreshold contrast in emmetropic and highly aberrated eyes. Methods: A large stroke adaptive optics system was used to correct ocular aberrations. Contrast constancy was assessed psychophysically in emmetropic and keratoconic eyes using a contrast matching paradigm. Participants adjusted the contrasts of gratings at various spatial frequencies to match the contrast perception of a reference grating at 4 c/deg. Matching was done both with fully corrected and uncorrected ocular aberrations. Optical correction allowed keratoconus patients to perceive high spatial frequencies that they have not experienced for some time. Results: Emmetropic observers exhibited contrast constancy both with their native aberrations and when their aberrations were corrected. Keratoconus patients exhibited contrast constancy with their uncorrected, native optics but they did not exhibit constancy during adaptive optics correction. Instead. they exhibited striking underconstancy: they required more contrast at high spatial frequencies than the contrast of the 4-c/deg stimulus to make them seem to have the same contrast. Conclusions: The presence of contrast constancy in emmetropes and keratoconus patients viewing with their native optics suggests that they have learned to amplify neural signals to offset the effects of habitual optical aberrations. The fact that underconstancy was observed in keratoconus patients when their optics were corrected suggests that they were unable to learn the appropriate neural amplification because they did not have experience with fine spatial detail. These results show that even adults can learn neural amplification to counteract the effects of their own optical aberrations.

Binocular accommodative response with extended depth of focus under controlled convergences.

Vergence and accommodation can be mismatched under virtual reality viewing conditions, and this mismatch has been thought to be one of the main causes of visual discomfort. The goal of this study was to investigate how optical conditions of the eyes affect accommodative responses to different convergence. Specifically, we hypothesized that extending the depth of focus (DoF) could weaken the control of the screen on accommodation, so that accommodation could be induced by convergence. To test this hypothesis, we extended the DoF using Zernike spherical aberrations (fourth and sixth orders) induced by a binocular adaptive optics (AO) vision simulator. Nine normal subjects between the ages of 21 and 34 (26 ± 5) years were recruited. Three optical conditions were generated: AO condition (aberration-free), monovision condition, and extended depth of focus (EDoF) condition. Binocular accommodative responses, along with binocular visual acuity and stereoacuity, were measured under all three optical conditions with varied binocular vergence levels. At 3 diopters of binocular convergence, the EDoF condition was the most efficient in inducing excessive accommodative response compared with the monovision condition and the AO condition. Visual acuity was impaired with EDoF as compared with the other two conditions. The average stereoscopic thresholds (at 0 vergence) under the EDoF condition were degraded compared with the AO condition but were superior to those of the monovision condition. Therefore, despite some compromise to visual performance, extending the DoF could allow for a more natural vergence-accommodation relationship, providing the potential for alleviating the vergence-accommodation conflict and associated visual fatigue symptoms in virtual reality.

Optics and neural adaptation jointly limit human stereovision.

Stereovision is the ability to perceive fine depth variations from small differences in the two eyes' images. Using adaptive optics, we show that even minute optical aberrations that are not clinically correctable, and go unnoticed in everyday vision, can affect stereo acuity. Hence, the human binocular system is capable of using fine details that are not experienced in everyday vision. Interestingly, stereo acuity varied considerably across individuals even when they were provided identical perfect optics. We also found that individuals' stereo acuity is better when viewing with their habitual optics rather than someone else's (better) optics. Together, these findings suggest that the visual system compensates for habitual optical aberrations through neural adaptation and thereby optimizes stereovision uniquely for each individual. Thus, stereovision is limited by small optical aberrations and by neural adaptation to one's own optics.

Functional reallocation of sensory processing resources caused by long-term neural adaptation to altered optics.

The eye's optics are a major determinant of visual perception. Elucidating how long-term exposure to optical defects affects visual processing is key to understanding the capacity for, and limits of, sensory plasticity. Here, we show evidence of functional reallocation of sensory processing resources following long-term exposure to poor optical quality. Using adaptive optics to bypass all optical defects, we assessed visual processing in neurotypically-developed adults with healthy eyes and with keratoconus - a corneal disease causing severe optical aberrations. Under fully-corrected optical conditions, keratoconus patients showed altered contrast sensitivity, with impaired sensitivity for fine spatial details and better-than-typical sensitivity for coarse spatial details. Both gains and losses in sensitivity were more pronounced in patients experiencing poorer optical quality in their daily life and mediated by changes in signal enhancement mechanisms. These findings show that adult neural processing adapts to better match the changes in sensory inputs caused by long-term exposure to altered optics.

An Alternative Theory of Binocularity.

The fact that seeing with two eyes is universal among vertebrates raises a problem that has long challenged vision scientists: how do animals with overlapping visual fields combine non-identical right and left eye images to achieve fusion and the perception of depth that follows? Most theories address this problem in terms of matching corresponding images on the right and left retinas. Here we suggest an alternative theory of binocular vision based on anatomical correspondence that circumvents the correspondence problem and provides a rationale for ocular dominance.

Solving the stereo correspondence problem with false matches.

The stereo correspondence problem exists because false matches between the images from multiple sensors camouflage the true (veridical) matches. True matches are correspondences between image points that have the same generative source; false matches are correspondences between similar image points that have different sources. This problem of selecting true matches among false ones must be overcome by both biological and artificial stereo systems in order for them to be useful depth sensors. The proposed re-examination of this fundamental issue shows that false matches form a symmetrical pattern in the array of all possible matches, with true matches forming the axis of symmetry. The patterning of false matches can therefore be used to locate true matches and derive the depth profile of the surface that gave rise to them. This reverses the traditional strategy, which treats false matches as noise. The new approach is particularly well-suited to extract the 3-D locations and shapes of camouflaged surfaces and to work in scenes characterized by high degrees of clutter. We demonstrate that the symmetry of false-match signals can be exploited to identify surfaces in random-dot stereograms. This strategy permits novel depth computations for target detection, localization, and identification by machine-vision systems, accounts for physiological and psychophysical findings that are otherwise puzzling and makes possible new ways for combining stereo and motion signals.

Attentional selection in judgments of stereo depth.

Stereoscopic depth is most useful when it comes from relative rather than absolute disparities. However, the depth perceived from relative disparities can vary with stimulus parameters that have no connection with depth or are irrelevant to the task. We investigated observers' ability to judge the stereo depth of task-relevant stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli. The calculation of depth from disparity differs for 1-D and 2-D stimuli and we investigated the role this difference plays in observers' ability to selectively process relevant information. We show that the presence of irrelevant disparities affects perceived depth differently depending on stimulus dimensionality. Observers could not ignore disparities of irrelevant stimuli when they judged the relative depth between a 1-D stimulus (a grating) and a 2-D stimulus (a plaid). Yet these irrelevant disparities did not affect judgments of the relative depth between 2-D stimuli. Two processes contributing to stereo depth were identified, only one of which computes depth from a horizontal disparity metric and permits attentional selection. The other uses all stimuli, relevant and irrelevant, to calculate an effective disparity direction for comparing disparity magnitudes. These processes produce inseparable effects in most data sets. Using multiple disparity directions and comparing 1-D and 2-D stimuli can distinguish them.