Person:

Haun, Andrew Morgan

Background: Homonymous hemianopia (HH) is an anisotropic visual impairment characterized by the binocular inability to see one side of the visual field. Patients with HH often misperceive visual space. Here we investigated how HH affects visual motor control. Methods and Findings: Seven patients with complete HH and no neglect or cognitive decline and seven gender- and age-matched controls viewed displays in which a target moved randomly along the horizontal or the vertical axis. They used a joystick to control the target movement to keep it at the center of the screen. We found that the mean deviation of the target position from the center of the screen along the horizontal axis was biased toward the blind side for five out of seven HH patients. More importantly, while the normal vision controls showed more precise control and larger response amplitudes when the target moved along the horizontal rather than the vertical axis, the control performance of the HH patients was not different between these two target motion experimental conditions. Conclusions: Compared with normal vision controls, HH affected patients' control performance when the target moved horizontally (i.e., along the axis of their visual impairment) rather than vertically. We conclude that hemianopia affects the use of visual information for online control of a moving target specific to the axis of visual impairment. The implications of the findings for driving in hemianopic patients are discussed.

Background: The image formed by the eye's optics is blurred by the ocular aberrations, specific to each eye. Recent studies demonstrated that the eye is adapted to the level of blur produced by the high order aberrations (HOA). We examined whether visual coding is also adapted to the orientation of the natural HOA of the eye. Methods and Findings: Judgments of perceived blur were measured in 5 subjects in a psychophysical procedure inspired by the “Classification Images” technique. Subjects were presented 500 pairs of images, artificially blurred with HOA from 100 real eyes (i.e. different orientations), with total blur level adjusted to match the subject's natural blur. Subjects selected the image that appeared best focused in each random pair, in a 6-choice ranked response. Images were presented through Adaptive Optics correction of the subject's aberrations. The images selected as best focused were identified as positive, the other as negative responses. The highest classified positive responses correlated more with the subject's Point Spread Function, PSF, (r = 0.47 on average) than the negative (r = 0.34) and the difference was significant for all subjects (p<0.02). Using the orientation of the best fitting ellipse of angularly averaged integrated PSF intensities (weighted by the subject's responses) we found that in 4 subjects the positive PSF response was close to the subject's natural PSF orientation (within 21 degrees on average) whereas the negative PSF response was almost perpendicularly oriented to the natural PSF (at 76 degrees on average). Conclusions: The Classification-Images inspired method is very powerful in identifying the internally coded blur of subjects. The consistent bias of the Positive PSFs towards the natural PSF in most subjects indicates that the internal code of blur appears rather specific to each subject's high order aberrations and reveals that the calibration mechanisms for normalizing blur also operate using orientation cues.