A Gaze-contingent Saccadic Re-referencing Training with Simulated Central Vision Loss

Overview

Journal J Vis

Specialty Ophthalmology

Date 2023 Jan 20

PMID 36662502

Authors

Sharavanan Ganesan

Natalia Melnik

Elena Azanon

Stefan Pollmann

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Patients with central vision loss (CVL) adopt an eccentric retinal location for fixation, a preferred retinal location (PRL), to compensate for vision loss at the fovea. Although most patients with CVL are able to rapidly use a PRL instead of the fovea, saccadic re-referencing to a PRL develops slowly. Without re-referencing, saccades land the saccade target in the scotoma. This results in corrective saccades and leads to inefficient visual exploration. Here, we tested a new method to train saccadic re-referencing. Healthy participants performed gaze-contingent visual search tasks with simulated central scotoma in which participants had to fixate targets with an experimenter-defined forced retinal location (FRL). In experiment 1, we compared single-target search and foraging search tasks in the course of five training sessions. Results showed that both tasks improved the efficiency of gaze sequences and led to saccadic re-referencing to the FRL. In experiment 2, we trained participants extensively for 25 sessions, both with and without a gaze-contingent FRL-marker visible during training. After extensive training, observers' performance approached that of foveal vision. Thus, gaze-contingent FRL-fixation may become an efficient tool for saccadic re-referencing training in patients with central vision loss.

Citing Articles

Efficient versus inefficient visual search as training for saccadic re-referencing to an extrafoveal location.

Melnik N, Pollmann S J Vis. 2023; 23(10):13.

PMID: 37733339 PMC: 10517419. DOI: 10.1167/jov.23.10.13.

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