No abstract

Presbyopia, from the Greek for aging eye, is, like death and taxes, inevitable. Presbyopia causes near vision to degrade with age, affecting virtually everyone over the age of 50. Presbyopia has multiple negative effects on the quality of vision and the quality of life, due to limitations on daily activities – in particular, reading. In addition presbyopia results in reduced near visual acuity, reduced contrast sensitivity, and slower processing speed. Currently available solutions, such as optical corrections, are not ideal for all daily activities. Here we show that perceptual learning (repeated practice on a demanding visual task) results in improved visual performance in presbyopes, enabling them to overcome and/or delay some of the disabilities imposed by the aging eye. This improvement was achieved without changing the optical characteristics of the eye. The results suggest that the aging brain retains enough plasticity to overcome the natural biological deterioration with age.

Visual crowding, as context modulation, reduce the ability to recognize objects in clutter, sets a fundamental limit on visual perception and object recognition. It's considered that crowding does not exist in the fovea and extensive efforts explored crowding in the periphery revealed various models that consider several aspects of spatial processing. Studies showed that spatial and temporal crowding are correlated, suggesting a tradeoff between spatial and temporal processing of crowding. We hypothesized that limiting stimulus availability should decrease object recognition in clutter. Here we show, for the first time, that robust contour interactions exist in the fovea for much larger target-flanker spacing than reported previously: participants overcome crowded conditions for long presentations times but exhibit contour interaction effects for short presentation times. Thus, by enabling enough processing time in the fovea, contour interactions can be overcome, enabling object recognition. Our results suggest that contemporary models of context modulation should include both time and spatial processing.

The visual system can adapt to optical blur, whereby the adapted image is perceived as sharp. Here we show that adaptation reduces blur-induced biases in shape perception, with repeated adaptations (perceptual learning), leading to unbiased perception upon re-exposure to blur. Observers wore a cylindrical lens of +1.00 D on one eye, thus simulating monocular astigmatism. The other eye was either masked with a translucent blurred lens (monocular) or unmasked (dichoptic). Adaptation was tested in several repeated sessions with a proximity-grouping task, using horizontally or vertically arranged dot-arrays, without feedback, before, after, and throughout the adaptation period. A robust bias in global-orientation judgment was observed with the lens, in accordance with the blur axes. After the observer wore the lens for 2 h, there was no significant change in the bias, but after 4 h, the monocular condition, but not the dichoptic, resulted in reduced bias. The adaptation effect of the monocular 4-h adaptation was preserved, and even improved, when the lens was re-applied the next day, indicating learning. After-effects were observed under all experimental conditions except for the 4-h monocular condition, where learning took place. We suggest that, with long experience, adaptation is transferred to a long-term memory that can be instantly engaged when blur is re-applied, or disengaged when blur is removed, thus leaving no after-effects. The comparison between the monocular and dichoptic conditions indicates a binocular cortical site of plasticity.