Useful field of view test performance throughout adulthood in subjects without ocular disorders

Abstract

Previous research has shown an age-related decline in Useful Field of View (UFOV) test performance, which measures the duration required to extract relevant information from a scene in three subtasks. However, these results are mostly based on data that may have been confounded by (age-related) ocular diseases. We examined UFOV performance in subjects aged 19.5 to 70.3 years to investigate how UFOV performance changes throughout adulthood. All subjects underwent a thorough ophthalmological examination to exclude ocular disorders. We also examined some elementary visual functions, i.e., near and far visual acuity, crowding and contrast sensitivity. We investigated whether these functions were related to age and whether they could explain a possible age-related decline in UFOV performance. The subjects (n = 41) performed very well on almost every measure and reached far better UFOV and visual acuity scores than those reported by other studies that relied on self-reported absence of ocular pathology. We did not find significant relationships between age and any of the elementary visual functions or the first two UFOV subtasks (R2UFOV1 = 0.03, p = 0.25; R2UFOV2 = 0.07, p = 0.10). However, we found an age-related decline in performance on the third UFOV subtask (R2UFOV3 = 0.36, p < 0.001), which was unrelated to performance on the elementary visual function tasks. Our results show that performance on the first two UFOV subtasks as well as central elementary visual functions may remain high in the absence of obvious ophthalmological pathology.

Useful Field of View Performance in the Intact Visual Field of Hemianopia Patients

“…Indeed, a floor effect has been reported for healthy participants in the past. 21,36,37 Yet, whereas healthy control participants in our study all reached the lowest, that is, best score, some patients did not. Furthermore, patients who were not included in the analyses because they were unable to finish all three iUFOV subtests did show reduced performance on this subtest.…”

“…However, we did not have age-corrected measures available for the iUFOV or adapted NEI VFQ-25, which are also affected by age. 36 , 37 , 45 , 46 We, therefore, calculated an uncorrected HFA score based on the raw visual sensitivity scores of the entire visual field for both eyes. To correct for age, we matched our patient and control groups.…”

Can Three-Dimensional Multiple Object Tracking Training Be Used to Improve Simulated Driving Performance? A Pilot Study in Young and Older Adults

“…Considering the established literature demonstrating the utility of UFOV as a predictor of driving performance and the evidence that it may improve driver reaction time, we elected to include the UFOV version 7 as an additional mid-level transfer outcome measure of 3D-MOT training. This version of the test (described in in detail by Woutersen et al ( 2018 )) is composed of three subtests that measure, respectively, (1) processing speed, (2) processing speed under a divided attention condition and, finally, (3) processing speed under a selective attention condition. To date, no study has demonstrated transfer of 3D-MOT training to UFOV performance in healthy older adults.…”

Three-dimensional multiple object tracking improves young adult cognitive abilities associated with driving: evidence for transfer to the useful field of view

“…One significant outlier in the control group was identified using boxplots of pretraining UFOV scores and removed from subsequent analyses (following [ 19 ]). We added participants’ UFOV scores across all three subtests as young adults tend to exhibit floor effects 1 with very little variability on the first two subtests [ 20 ], and conducted statistical analyses on total UFOV scores after confirming that this aggregate measure did not violate the assumption of normality. To compare post-training 3D-MOT, UFOV and perceptual discrimination task improvement between both groups, we conducted a univariate analysis of covariance tests with pretraining scores entered as a covariate (following recommendations of [ 21 ]).…”