Projects

We investigated whether relative motion can serve as a cue for sustained attention. We found that relative motion perception has a long latency and that it can indeed attract attention to improve discrimination performance.

Reference

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Poggel DA, Strasburger H, MacKeben M. (2007) Cueing attention by relative motion in the periphery of the visual field. Perception 36(7) 955 - 970. (pubmed)

We studied letter recognition in 8 deg eccentricity from the fovea after attracting sustained focal attention to the stimulated location by a cue. Young and elderly healthy subjects, as well as patients with central vision loss participated. We found that the ability to utilize focal attention has an irregular topographic component in some subjects. The experiments in patients indicated that locations with high attentional potential are more likely to be used as preferred retinal loci after central vision loss.

References

MacKeben, M. (1999) Sustained Focal Attention and Peripheral Letter…

Typographical features of letters were manipulated in such a way that frequently occurring letter confusions in eccentric viewing happened less frequently. This demonstrated that a combination of psychophysics and goal-directed modification of typographic features is a viable experimental strategy.

Reference

MacKeben M. (2000) Enhancement of peripheral letter recognition by typographical features. Visual Impairment Research 2, (2) 95 -103. (link to VIR)

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We studied the ability of dyslexic young teenagers to fluently name pictograms (shapes of objects). We found that some dyslexics are very good at this task, some were even better than the control subjects.

We also investigated whether dyslexics make instantaneous automatic adjustments of reading saccades depending on word length. We found evidence that dyslexics have the mechanisms to make such adjustments, but that they are quantitatively impaired.

References

Trauzettel-Klosinski S, MacKeben M, Reinhard J, Feucht A, Dürrwächter U & Klosinski G (2002) Pictogram naming in dyslexics and normal…

We introduced a novel approach to topographic function assessment in visual impairment that requires neither fixation nor reading.

The test measures the time it takes for patients to find and identify 32 targets on a screen. The task discourages steady fixation and the subjects can make eye movements as needed to solve the task. Target size is always double the size threshold, and no manual action is required.

We have used this test on many low vision patients with varying diagnoses. Measurements yielded a wide variety of performance levels, with a factor of 14-16 between best and worst…

Most prior research on reading in people with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) has focused on those with advanced disease. The first goal of this project is to examine the visual, motor, and cognitive factors that contribute to reading performance in people with early to intermediate(E/I) AMD. A second goal is to compare those with E/I AMD to age-matched groups with no AMD, and with advanced disease to determine which characteristics of the E/I AMD participants more closely match those with advanced AMD. The final goal is to assess our E/I AMD participants longitudinally to determine…