Investigation of the impact of blur under mobile attentional orientation using a vision simulator

It is well-known that correction of blur can improve visual perception. However, it is unclear how the beneficial effect of correction is affected by the regions of correction and the spatial uncertainty introduced by the retinal stimulation. The purpose of this study was two-fold: first, to compare the impacts of blur correction between isoeccentric locations of the visual field; and second, to evaluate the effect of spatial cueing in each corrected location on performing a simple task. Five subjects were asked to complete a simple detection task of a small dark spot stimulus presented randomly at four cardinal retinal locations (eccentricity: 5°) under manipulation of attention via an exogenous cue. Both clear and blurred targets were randomly displayed across the visual field and viewed monocularly through a vision simulator, used to minimize peripheral ocular aberrations. Results confirmed the advantage of clear vs/ blurred images under spatial uncertainty. It was also found that the visual benefit from blur correction is unequal at isoeccentric locations, even for a simple detection task. While manipulation of attention in the presence of spatial uncertainty significantly modulated response time (RT) performance, no differential effect was observed for clear and blurred stimuli, suggesting that attention has only a small effect on the optical benefit for a simple detection task when the display is depleted (no distractor). Those observations highlight the importance of field performance asymmetries in optical interventions and may offer useful implications for the design of extrafoveal refractive correction. Further studies are needed to elucidate how the focus of attention interacts with the perceived gain of vision correction.