Abstract
We rely on our vision for many daily tasks such as navigation, reading, and watching television. Therefore visual deficits due to disease/degeneration of the eye, injury, or aging can have a significant negative impact on one’s quality of life. Many occupations heavily rely on vision including law enforcement or healthcare providers. Vision is also essential in the world of competitive sports. Enhancement of visual abilities could have substantial lifestyle benefits. Research in the field of perceptual learning has found many perceptual abilities can improve after training, as well as a variety of factors that promote learning. Based on this research we have developed a video-game based visual training program – UltimEyes[sup]TM[/sup] (UE). UE is designed to improve both central and peripheral vision. It trains on a variety of features with the goal of producing general, not specific vision improvements. Twenty-two healthy participants with normal vision (ages 18-55) completed an average of 24, 25 minute training sessions. Participants showed improvements in both foveal and peripheral acuity and contrast sensitivity after training with the UE program, while control subjects did not show improvements. These results indicate the UE program is sufficient to induce visual improvements after training in participants with normal vision. Following these finding, a 5 year old amblyopic patient completed 32 sessions of the UE program. After training, acuity in the amblyopic eye improved from 20/80 to 20/40, and acuity in the non-amblyopic eye improved from 20/63 to 20/32. Binocular acuity changed from 20/63 (indicating no binocular advantage) to 20/20 (a binocular advantage). Post-training stereoacuity reached 50 sec of arc, where no reading was obtained prior to training. Re-testing confirmed these results persist at least 3 months post-training. These results show that UE has significant potential as a visual training therapy in both normally seeing and low-vision individuals.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013