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Age-related decline of peripheral visual processing: the role of eye movements

Earlier work suggests that the area of space from which useful visual information can be extracted (useful field of view, UFoV) shrinks in old age. We investigated whether this shrinkage, documented previously with a visual search task, extends to a bimanual tracking task. Young and elderly subjects...

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Autores principales: Beurskens, Rainer, Bock, Otmar
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer-Verlag 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279647/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22179529
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2978-3
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author Beurskens, Rainer
Bock, Otmar
author_facet Beurskens, Rainer
Bock, Otmar
author_sort Beurskens, Rainer
collection PubMed
description Earlier work suggests that the area of space from which useful visual information can be extracted (useful field of view, UFoV) shrinks in old age. We investigated whether this shrinkage, documented previously with a visual search task, extends to a bimanual tracking task. Young and elderly subjects executed two concurrent tracking tasks with their right and left arms. The separation between tracking displays varied from 3 to 35 cm. Subjects were asked to fixate straight ahead (condition FIX) or were free to move their eyes (condition FREE). Eye position was registered. In FREE, young subjects tracked equally well at all display separations. Elderly subjects produced higher tracking errors, and the difference between age groups increased with display separation. Eye movements were comparable across age groups. In FIX, elderly and young subjects tracked less well at large display separations. Seniors again produced higher tracking errors in FIX, but the difference between age groups did not increase reliably with display separation. However, older subjects produced a substantial number of illicit saccades, and when the effect of those saccades was factored out, the difference between young and older subjects’ tracking did increase significantly with display separation in FIX. We conclude that the age-related shrinkage of UFoV, previously documented with a visual search task, is observable with a manual tracking task as well. Older subjects seem to partly compensate their deficit by illicit saccades. Since the deficit is similar in both conditions, it may be located downstream from the convergence of retinal and oculomotor signals.
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spelling pubmed-32796472012-03-01 Age-related decline of peripheral visual processing: the role of eye movements Beurskens, Rainer Bock, Otmar Exp Brain Res Research Article Earlier work suggests that the area of space from which useful visual information can be extracted (useful field of view, UFoV) shrinks in old age. We investigated whether this shrinkage, documented previously with a visual search task, extends to a bimanual tracking task. Young and elderly subjects executed two concurrent tracking tasks with their right and left arms. The separation between tracking displays varied from 3 to 35 cm. Subjects were asked to fixate straight ahead (condition FIX) or were free to move their eyes (condition FREE). Eye position was registered. In FREE, young subjects tracked equally well at all display separations. Elderly subjects produced higher tracking errors, and the difference between age groups increased with display separation. Eye movements were comparable across age groups. In FIX, elderly and young subjects tracked less well at large display separations. Seniors again produced higher tracking errors in FIX, but the difference between age groups did not increase reliably with display separation. However, older subjects produced a substantial number of illicit saccades, and when the effect of those saccades was factored out, the difference between young and older subjects’ tracking did increase significantly with display separation in FIX. We conclude that the age-related shrinkage of UFoV, previously documented with a visual search task, is observable with a manual tracking task as well. Older subjects seem to partly compensate their deficit by illicit saccades. Since the deficit is similar in both conditions, it may be located downstream from the convergence of retinal and oculomotor signals. Springer-Verlag 2011-12-17 2012 /pmc/articles/PMC3279647/ /pubmed/22179529 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2978-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2011 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Beurskens, Rainer
Bock, Otmar
Age-related decline of peripheral visual processing: the role of eye movements
title Age-related decline of peripheral visual processing: the role of eye movements
title_full Age-related decline of peripheral visual processing: the role of eye movements
title_fullStr Age-related decline of peripheral visual processing: the role of eye movements
title_full_unstemmed Age-related decline of peripheral visual processing: the role of eye movements
title_short Age-related decline of peripheral visual processing: the role of eye movements
title_sort age-related decline of peripheral visual processing: the role of eye movements
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279647/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22179529
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2978-3
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