Although there are well-recognized declines in visual functioning with age, their contribution to the problems of older persons on tasks in the natural environment, including driving, are largely unknown. Adults ranging in age from 22-92 years were surveyed in regard to their visual difficulties when driving and performing everyday tasks. The visual problems of drivers increased with age along five different visual dimensions: unexpected vehicles, vehicle speed, dim displays, windshield problems, and sign reading. Several of the age-related visual problems that were reported appear to be related to the types of automobile accidents more common among older drivers. The study also replicated the findings from an earlier investigation of non-driving tasks that showed visual declines with age on five dimensions: visual processing speed, light sensitivity, dynamic vision, near vision and visual search. These findings indicate promising areas of research regarding the effects of visual aging on tasks in the natural environment.

A pair of surveys asked healthy adults about their everyday visual problems. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 100 and were screened for major visual impairment. Respondents rated the frequency of difficulty they had performing visual tasks such as reading, recognizing objects, picking out a face in a crowd, seeing in dimly lit environments, seeing moving objects, and so on. The surveys revealed five dimensions that declined with increasing age: visual processing speed, light sensitivity, dynamic vision, near vision, and visual search. The percentage of respondents reporting a decline in these visual dimensions increased two- to sixfold across the adult life span. Varying rates of visual decline for different tasks suggest that various aspects of vision age at different rates.

We conducted a survey in order to gain insights into the reasons older persons decide to give up driving. Our survey focused on vision. We probed the relationship between visual deficiencies and driving status by asking older people about the problems they encountered while performing routine visual tasks. The results showed that older persons who had recently given up driving reported more visual problems than did their driving counterparts. These problems related to difficulties in dynamic vision, visual processing speed, visual search, light sensitivity, and near vision. The results suggested that older persons are sensitive to their own visual deficits and that this awareness influences decisions about driving.

The purpose of this study was to determine if older adults have more difficulty than younger adults in judging either the distance or speed of approaching vehicles. Eighteen elderly and 27 younger adults made judgements of the speed and distance of a video-taped automobile. Velocity judgements were made of 5 s segments of the car moving at 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 mph. Distance judgements were based on 5 static sequences of the same test vehicle at 190, 235, 300, 360, and 480 ft. It was found that older women gave significantly higher estimates of car velocity than did younger ones. Older males also gave disproportionately high estimates of the car's distance. To the extent that these simulation data can be generalized to real-life settings, they suggest that older drivers and pedestrians (particularly older males) would view it as relatively safer than younger drivers to enter or cross the lane of an approaching car. Future research might be directed to a determination of age differences in distance perception under three-dimensional viewing conditions.

In previous work we reported that fixation stability did not deteriorate in older adults over relatively long viewing durations. In the present study we reanalyzed the data to examine potential aging effects on fixational control for viewing durations typically used in psychological experimentation. Monocular eye movements were recorded in 12 older and 12 younger observers using a dual Purkinje image technique, while observers fixated a stationary target. The two-dimensional scatter of eye positions was measured during nine viewing durations ranging from 100 ms to 12.8 s. Fixational control of the two groups was comparable at all of the viewing durations. Both younger and older observers were able to maintain fixation within an area several times smaller than the size of the fovea. Implications for aging studies that use briefly presented visual stimuli are discussed.