Improvement of dynamic phosphene presentation for a cortical visual prosthesis is task-specific

Cortical visual prostheses can restore vision by directly stimulating the neurons in the visual cortex. The goal of these prostheses is to elicit sufficient light perception, known as phosphenes, to represent complex scenes. However, stimulating a large number of electrodes in cortical visual prostheses can be problematic. This may result in distorted visual perception and failure to present the desired visual stimuli. Previous studies have successfully presented simple patterns, such as letters, by dynamically utilizing a single phosphene. To represent more complex scenes, we propose a new method of information presentation. This method limits the number of phosphenes elicited simultaneously while sequentially presenting the contours of a visual scene. We evaluated its effectiveness with 8 participants across four different tasks. We found that the improvement provided by this method is task-specific. Our findings underscore the importance of considering the temporal features of prosthetic vision in future designs.