The Effect of Aging on Crowded Letter Recognition in the Peripheral Visual Field

Astle, Andrew T.; Blighe, Alan; Webb, Ben S.; McGraw, Paul V.

doi:10.1167/iovs.14-14181

Cited by 18 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 62 publications

(79 reference statements)

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“…This result is consistent with previous studies on crowding in peripheral vision using resolution acuity 14,15 and surround suppression studies in central vision using contrast matching tasks 2 ; however, ours is the first direct measurement of crowding and suppression in the same older individuals and specifically using stimuli designed to allow such comparison across tasks. Our observed absence of a correlation between crowding and surround suppression is consistent with previous suggestions of distinct mechanisms underpinning these spatial visual phenomena.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…15 The authors argued that the fact that crowding is unaffected by aging provides support for mechanistic differences between surround suppression and crowding effects in peripheral vision, given that numerous previous studies have shown alterations to surround suppression of contrast in older adults. However, this hypothesis was not tested directly because surround suppression was not measured.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Effect of Aging and Attention on Visual Crowding and Surround Suppression of Perceived Contrast Threshold

Malavita

Vidyasagar

McKendrick

2017

Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci.

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Citation: Malavita MS, Vidyasagar TR, McKendrick AM. The effect of aging and attention on visual crowding and surround suppression of perceived contrast threshold. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2017;58:860-867. DOI: 10.1167/iovs.16-20632 PURPOSE. The purpose of this study was to study how, in midperipheral vision, aging affects visual processes that interfere with target detection (crowding and surround suppression) and to determine whether the performance on such tasks are related to visuospatial attention as measured by visual search. METHODS.We investigated the effect of aging on crowding and suppression in detection of a target in peripheral vision, using different types of flanking stimuli. Both thresholds were also obtained while varying the position of the flanker (placed inside or outside of target, relative to fixation). Crowding thresholds were also estimated with spatial uncertainty (jitter). Additionally, we included a visual search task comprising Gabor stimuli to investigate whether performance is related to top-down attention. Twenty young adults (age, 18-32 years; mean age, 26.1 years; 10 males) and 19 older adults (age, 60-74 years; mean age, 70.3 years; 10 males) participated in the study. RESULTS.Older adults showed more surround suppression than the young (F[1,37] ¼ 4.21; P < 0.05), but crowding was unaffected by age. In the younger group, the position of the flanker influenced the strength of crowding, but not the strength of suppression (F[1,39] ¼ 4.11; P < 0.05). Crowding was not affected by spatial jitter of the stimuli. Neither crowding nor surround suppression was predicted by attentional efficiency measured in the visual search task. There was also no significant correlation between crowding and surround suppression.CONCLUSIONS. We show that aging does not affect visual crowding but does increase surround suppression of contrast, suggesting that crowding and surround suppression may be distinct visual phenomena. Furthermore, strengths of crowding and surround suppression did not correlate with each other nor could they be predicted by efficiency of visual search.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

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confidence: 99%

The Effect of Aging and Attention on Visual Crowding and Surround Suppression of Perceived Contrast Threshold

Malavita

Vidyasagar

McKendrick

2017

Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci.

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“…Since we used a crowded word identification task, differences in word identification speed between individuals could have been due to differences in crowded visual acuity. However, crowded letter recognition in the peripheral visual field of normal participants does not change significantly with age (Astle, Blighe, Webb, & McGraw, 2014) and, thus, differences in word identification speed are more likely to reflect differences in temporal processing. Temporal processing speed for identifying strings of random letters has been shown to be slower in the peripheral visual field compared to central vision (Cheong et al, 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

The effect of normal aging and age-related macular degeneration on perceptual learning

et al. 2015

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We investigated whether perceptual learning could be used to improve peripheral word identification speed. The relationship between the magnitude of learning and age was established in normal participants to determine whether perceptual learning effects are age invariant. We then investigated whether training could lead to improvements in patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Twenty-eight participants with normal vision and five participants with AMD trained on a word identification task. They were required to identify three-letter words, presented 10° from fixation. To standardize crowding across each of the letters that made up the word, words were flanked laterally by randomly chosen letters. Word identification performance was measured psychophysically using a staircase procedure. Significant improvements in peripheral word identification speed were demonstrated following training (71% ± 18%). Initial task performance was correlated with age, with older participants having poorer performance. However, older adults learned more rapidly such that, following training, they reached the same level of performance as their younger counterparts. As a function of number of trials completed, patients with AMD learned at an equivalent rate as age-matched participants with normal vision. Improvements in word identification speed were maintained at least 6 months after training. We have demonstrated that temporal aspects of word recognition can be improved in peripheral vision with training across a range of ages and these learned improvements are relatively enduring. However, training targeted at other bottlenecks to peripheral reading ability, such as visual crowding, may need to be incorporated to optimize this approach.

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“…Furthermore, the fact that temporal frequency thresholds were similar for both dots/ring condition suggests that crowding did not limit performance in the more dense condition. It is possible that dots in the middle ring may have experienced some crowding from the dots on the outer ring in the radial direction, but this would have been constant across all conditions and likely affected both older and younger groups equally, as studies have shown that aging does not affect crowding strength or critical spacing thresholds (Astle, Blighe, Webb, & McGraw, 2014).…”

Section: Performance With Multiple Targets and The Efficiency Of Divimentioning

confidence: 99%

Different effects of aging and gender on the temporal resolution in attentional tracking

Roudaia

Faubert

2017

Journal of Vision

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The current study examined the role of temporal resolution of attention in the decline in multiple object tracking abilities with healthy aging. The temporal resolution of attention is known to limit attentional tracking of one and multiple targets (Holcombe & Chen, 2013). Here, we examined whether aging is associated with a lower temporal resolution of attention when tracking one target, the efficiency of splitting attention across multiple targets, or both. Stimuli comprised three concentric rings containing five or 10 equally spaced dots. While maintaining central fixation, younger and older participants tracked a target dot on one, two, or three rings while the rings rotated around fixation in random directions for 5 s. Rotational speed was varied to estimate speed or temporal frequency thresholds in six conditions. Results showed that younger and older participants had similar temporal frequency thresholds for tracking one target, but the addition of one and two more targets reduced thresholds more in the older group compared to the younger group. Gender also affected performance, with men having higher temporal frequency thresholds than women, independently of the number of targets. These findings indicate that the temporal resolution of attention for a single target depends on gender but is not affected by aging, whereas aging specifically affects the efficiency of dividing attention across multiple targets.

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The Effect of Aging on Crowded Letter Recognition in the Peripheral Visual Field

Cited by 18 publications

References 62 publications

The Effect of Aging and Attention on Visual Crowding and Surround Suppression of Perceived Contrast Threshold

The Effect of Aging and Attention on Visual Crowding and Surround Suppression of Perceived Contrast Threshold

The effect of normal aging and age-related macular degeneration on perceptual learning

Different effects of aging and gender on the temporal resolution in attentional tracking

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