2021
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229189
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What do blind people “see” with retinal prostheses? Observations and qualitative reports of epiretinal implant users

Abstract: Introduction Retinal implants have now been approved and commercially available for certain clinical populations for over 5 years, with hundreds of individuals implanted, scores of them closely followed in research trials. Despite these numbers, however, few data are available that would help us answer basic questions regarding the nature and outcomes of artificial vision: what do recipients see when the device is turned on for the first time, and how does that change over time? Methods Semi-structured inter… Show more

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Cited by 53 publications
(55 citation statements)
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“…This fate matches the abandon rate in cochlear implant or upper-limb prosthesis users that, if not abandoned, they often become an intermittent aid due to both their physiological and cognitive burden [38][39][40][41]. Similarly, artificial vision is a highly specific cognitive task, that implies long associative learning but also a permanent multisensory adjustment of the perception [37,35].…”
Section: The Cognitive Burden Of Transient Perceptsmentioning
confidence: 67%
See 2 more Smart Citations
“…This fate matches the abandon rate in cochlear implant or upper-limb prosthesis users that, if not abandoned, they often become an intermittent aid due to both their physiological and cognitive burden [38][39][40][41]. Similarly, artificial vision is a highly specific cognitive task, that implies long associative learning but also a permanent multisensory adjustment of the perception [37,35].…”
Section: The Cognitive Burden Of Transient Perceptsmentioning
confidence: 67%
“…The artificial vision provided by retinal implants allows profoundly blind patients to perform visual guided tasks, such as orientation, navigation, object recognition, object manipulation and reading [33,34]. However, the unnaturalistic vision provided by the current retinal prostheses is a significant issue to implanted patients in daily life [18,35,36]. A very small fraction of users decides to keep using their prosthesis at the end of the clinical trial due to the cognitive load of its use [35,37].…”
Section: The Cognitive Burden Of Transient Perceptsmentioning
confidence: 99%
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“…Most of the studies above relied on the so-called "scoreboard" method to render phosphenes, which assumes that each phosphene acts as a small independent light source, analogous to the images projected on the light bulb arrays of some sports stadium scoreboards [24]. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that the vision generated by current visual prostheses is "fundamentally different" from natural vision [26], with interactions between implant technology and the neural tissue degrading the quality of the generated artificial vision [8,29]. It is therefore unclear how the findings of most SPV studies would translate to real bionic eye users.…”
Section: Common Limitationsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…However, a growing body of evidence suggests that the vision provided by these devices differs substantially from natural eyesight [7], [8], [10], [12]. Retinal implant users often report seeing distorted percepts and require extensive rehabilitative training to make use of their new vision [10]. Although single-electrode phosphenes are consistent from trial to trial, they vary across electrodes and users [7], [21].…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%