No evidence for a common factor underlying visual abilities in healthy older people.

Shaqiri, Albulena; Pilz, Karin S.; Cretenoud, Aline F.; Neumann, Konrad; Clarke, Aaron; Kunchulia, Marina; Herzog, Michael H.

doi:10.1037/dev0000740

Cited by 16 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 83 publications

(123 reference statements)

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“…Despite the observed changes to the processing of the initial inputs to motion perception, we did not find an age effect on two tasks that require the integration of local motion signals: the perception of translational and radial global motion. Similar to newer evidence by Shaqiri et al (2019) , our correlational analysis did not show statistically significant relationships between the three more complex motion tasks (translational and radial global motion coherence, and biological motion), implying that mechanistically, the perception of these complex patterns does not rely directly on lower levels of processing. For example, small deficits in the perception of individual components of the RDK stimuli may not impact on the determination of overall global motion coherence.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Differential aging effects in motion perception tasks for central and peripheral vision

et al. 2020

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The perception of motion is considered critical for performing everyday tasks, such as locomotion and driving, and relies on different levels of visual processing. However, it is unclear whether healthy aging differentially affects motion processing at specific levels of processing, or whether performance at central and peripheral spatial eccentricities is altered to the same extent. The aim of this study was to explore the effects of aging on hierarchically different components of motion processing: the minimum displacement of dots to perceive motion (D min ), the minimum contrast and speed to determine the direction of motion, spatial surround suppression of motion, global motion coherence (translational and radial), and biological motion. We measured motion perception in both central vision and at 15° eccentricity, comparing performance in 20 older (60–79 years) and 20 younger (19–34 years) adults. Older adults had significantly elevated thresholds, relative to younger adults, for motion contrast, speed, D min , and biological motion. The differences between younger and older participants were of similar magnitude in central and peripheral vision, except for surround suppression of motion, which was weaker in central vision for the older group, but stronger in the periphery. Our findings demonstrate that the effects of aging are not uniform across all motion tasks. Whereas the performance of some tasks in the periphery can be predicted from the results in central vision, the effects of age on surround suppression of motion shows markedly different characteristics between central and peripheral vision.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Differential aging effects in motion perception tasks for central and peripheral vision

et al. 2020

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“…It is well known that both photopic and, even more so, scotopic light sensitivity decrease with age [47]. It is thus not surprising that visual performance shows a general decline with age, although different visual tasks may be affected differentially in an interindividually variable manner [48]. In the present study, results in both age groups agree insofar as mesopic acuity shows a similar dependence on stimulus duration as photopic acuity, while scotopic acuity exhibits a higher sensitivity to presentation duration.…”

Section: Differences Between Young and Older Participantssupporting

confidence: 81%

The “speed” of acuity in scotopic vs. photopic vision

Heinrich

Blechenberg

Reichel

et al. 2020

Graefes Arch Clin Exp Ophthalmol

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Purpose The effect of duration of optotype presentation on visual acuity measures has been extensively studied under photopic conditions. However, systematic data on duration dependence of acuity values under mesopic and scotopic conditions is scarce, despite being highly relevant for many visual tasks including night driving, and for clinical diagnostic applications. The present study aims to address this void. Methods We measured Landolt C acuity under photopic (90 cd/m 2), mesopic (0.7 cd/m 2), and scotopic (0.009 cd/m 2) conditions for several optotype presentation durations ranging from 0.1 to 10 s using the Freiburg Acuity and Contrast Test. Two age groups were tested (young, 18-29 years, and older, 61-74 years). Results As expected, under all luminance conditions, better acuity values were found for longer presentation durations. Photopic acuity in young participants decreased by about 0.25 log units from 0.1 to 10 s; mesopic vision mimicked the photopic visual behavior. Scotopic acuities depended more strongly on presentation duration (difference > 0.78 log units) than photopic values. There was no consistent pattern of correlation between luminance conditions across participants. We found a qualitative similarity between younger and older participants, despite higher variability among the latter and differences in absolute acuity: Photopic acuity difference (0.1 vs. 10 s) for the older participants was 0.19 log units, and scotopic difference was > 0.62 log units. Conclusion Scotopic acuity is more susceptible to changes in stimulus duration than photopic vision, with considerable interindividual variability. The latter may reflect differences in aging and sub-clinical pathophysiological processes and might have consequences for visual performance during nocturnal activities such as driving at night. Acuity testing with briefly presented scotopic stimuli might increase the usefulness of acuity assessment for tracking of the health state of the visual system.

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“…Aging was expected to strengthen the correlations between visual paradigms because aging effects occur more quickly or strongly for some people. However, only weak correlations were also observed between visual paradigms in older people (Shaqiri et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Factors underlying visual illusions are illusion-specific but not feature-specific

et al. 2019

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Common factors are ubiquitous. For example, there is a common factor, g, for intelligence. In vision, there is much weaker evidence for such common factors. For example, visual illusion magnitudes correlate only weakly with each other. Here, we investigated whether illusions are hyper-specific as in perceptual learning. First, we tested 19 variants of the Ebbinghaus illusion that differed in color, shape, or texture. Correlations between the illusion magnitudes of the different variants were mostly significant. Second, we reanalyzed a dataset from a previous experiment where 10 illusions were tested under four conditions of luminance and found significant correlations between the different luminance conditions of each illusion. However, there were only very weak correlations between the 10 different illusions. Third, five visual illusions were tested with four orientations. Again, there were significant correlations between the four orientations of each illusion, but not across different illusions. The weak inter-illusion correlations suggest that there is no unique common mechanism for the tested illusions. We suggest that most illusions make up their own factor.

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No evidence for a common factor underlying visual abilities in healthy older people.

Cited by 16 publications

References 83 publications

Differential aging effects in motion perception tasks for central and peripheral vision

Differential aging effects in motion perception tasks for central and peripheral vision

The “speed” of acuity in scotopic vs. photopic vision

Factors underlying visual illusions are illusion-specific but not feature-specific

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