title: Perceptual training yields rapid improvements in visually impaired youth.
abstract: Visual function demands coordinated responses to information over a wide field of view, involving both central and peripheral vision. Visually impaired individuals often seem to underutilize peripheral vision, even in absence of obvious peripheral deficits. Motivated by perceptual training studies with typically sighted adults, we examined the effectiveness of perceptual training in improving peripheral perception of visually impaired youth. Here, we evaluated the effectiveness of three training regimens: (1) an action video game, (2) a psychophysical task that combined attentional tracking with a spatially and temporally unpredictable motion discrimination task, and (3) a control video game. Training with both the action video game and modified attentional tracking yielded improvements in visual performance. Training effects were generally larger in the far periphery and appear to be stable 12 months after training. These results indicate that peripheral perception might be under-utilized by visually impaired youth and that this underutilization can be improved with only ~8 hours of perceptual training. Moreover, the similarity of improvements following attentional tracking and action video-game training suggest that well-documented effects of action video-game training might be due to the sustained deployment of attention to multiple dynamic targets while concurrently requiring rapid attending and perception of unpredictable events.
authors.affiliation: Vanderbilt Vision Research Center and Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, 37240, USA.|Department of Psychology, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI, 49855, USA.|Neurotrainer, Marquette, MI, 49855, USA.
authors.forename: Jeffrey B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Nyquist
authors.affiliation: Vanderbilt Vision Research Center and Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, 37240, USA.
authors.forename: Joseph S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Lappin
authors.affiliation: Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, Department of Radiology, University of Minnesota at Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN, 55455, USA.|Department of Brain &Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, USA.
authors.forename: Ruyuan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain &Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, USA.|Department of Ophthalmology, University of Rochester School of Medicine, Rochester, NY, 14642, USA.
authors.forename: Duje
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Tadin
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology; D007905:Lens Diseases / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000628:therapy*; D008268:Macular Degeneration / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000628:therapy*; D008297:Male; D026741:Physical Therapy Modalities; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012174:Retinitis Pigmentosa / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000628:therapy*; D013997:Time Factors; D018910:Video Games / Q000523:psychology; D014785:Vision, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D019987:Persons with Visual Disabilities / Q000534:rehabilitation*