Useful field of view test performance throughout adulthood in subjects without ocular disorders

Previous research has shown an age-related decline in Useful Field of View (UFOV) test performance, which measures the duration required to extract relevant information from a scene in three subtasks. However, these results are mostly based on data that may have been confounded by (age-related) ocular diseases. We examined UFOV performance in subjects aged 19.5 to 70.3 years to investigate how UFOV performance changes throughout adulthood. All subjects underwent a thorough ophthalmological examination to exclude ocular disorders. We also examined some elementary visual functions, i.e., near and far visual acuity, crowding and contrast sensitivity. We investigated whether these functions were related to age and whether they could explain a possible age-related decline in UFOV performance. The subjects (n = 41) performed very well on almost every measure and reached far better UFOV and visual acuity scores than those reported by other studies that relied on self-reported absence of ocular pathology. We did not find significant relationships between age and any of the elementary visual functions or the first two UFOV subtasks (R(2)(UFOV1) = 0.03, p = 0.25; R(2)(UFOV2) = 0.07, p = 0.10). However, we found an age-related decline in performance on the third UFOV subtask (R(2)(UFOV3) = 0.36, p < 0.001), which was unrelated to performance on the elementary visual function tasks. Our results show that performance on the first two UFOV subtasks as well as central elementary visual functions may remain high in the absence of obvious ophthalmological pathology.