The importance of sustained attention for patients with maculopathies

Sustained attention enhances perception in eccentric positions in the visual field, which helps patients with foveal vision loss to develop a peripheral 'preferred retinal locus' (PRL). Besides central scotoma topography, local variations of attentional performance could influence the choice of PRL location. We tested sustained attention augmenting peripheral letter recognition in 23 maculopathy patients and 15 normally-sighted subjects (eight positions, 8 degrees eccentricity). Performance was shown to depend on tested location, which was the same in patients and normals. This indicates that the choice of the PRL location after foveal vision loss can be influenced by topographic features of sustained attention.