Effects of Temporal Modulation on Crowding, Visual Span, and Reading

The temporal dynamics of visual crowding in letter recognition: Modulating crowding with alternating flicker presentations

Visual crowding reduces the visibility of a peripherally presented group of stimuli. This is especially challenging for peripheral reading because adjacent letters or characters perceptually crowd one another. We investigated the temporal course of spatial visual crowding by sequentially alternating the visibility of the target and flanking letters within a trigram letter stimulus presented 9° below fixation. We found that alternation rates of roughly 3 Hz released half of the total effect of crowding, whereas 10 Hz alternation rates elicited near-crowded performance. Furthermore, we found a robust performance asymmetry whereby presenting the target first elicited better performance than presenting the flankers first, an effect resembling forward masking. These results held for conditions of high, medium, and low spatial crowding. Future work will determine whether the alternation rates found in the current study can improve peripheral reading.

Training peripheral vision to read: Reducing crowding through an adaptive training method

Reading is slow and difficult for people with central vision loss who must rely on their peripheral vision. It has been shown that practicing on a letter-recognition task can increase peripheral reading speed, and that the training-related improvement is attributable mainly to reduced crowding. Since there is a high degree of variability in the vision conditions across people with central vision loss, a one-size-fits-all training protocol may not be adequate or appropriate for these patients. In this study, we target two aspects of training-training task and individual customization, and propose a training paradigm that focuses on reducing crowding and tailors training for each individual using an adaptive method. Seven normally-sighted adults were trained with four daily sessions of identifying crowded letters presented at various positions 10° below fixation in a pre/post design. During the training, a dynamic cue (jitter motion) was applied to target letters to modulate crowding. Amplitude of motion was varied on a block by block basis according to individual performance to maintain task difficulty near a pre-defined level (80% accuracy in letter recognition). We found that motion amplitude gradually reduced as training progressed, indicating a reduction in crowding. Following training, reading speed (measured using RSVP method) showed a significant improvement in both the trained (49%) and untrained (50%) visual fields. Despite showing similar improvement as observed in the previous training studies, our adaptive training method demands less effort and, most importantly, offers customization for each individual trainee.

Word Mode: a crowding-free reading protocol for individuals with macular disease

Central retinal loss through macular disease markedly reduces the ability to read largely because identification of a word using peripheral vision is negatively influenced by nearby text, a phenomenon termed visual crowding. Here, we present a novel peripheral reading protocol, termed Word Mode, that eliminates crowding by presenting each word in isolation but in a position that mimics its natural position in the line of text being read, with each new word elicited using a self-paced button press. We used a gaze-contingent paradigm to simulate a central scotoma in four normally-sighted observers, and measured oral reading speed for text positioned 7.5° in the inferior field. Compared with reading whole sentences, our crowding-free protocol increased peripheral reading speeds by up to a factor of seven, resulted in significantly fewer reading errors and fixations per sentence, and reduced both the critical print size and the text size required for spot reading by 0.2-0.3 logMAR. We conclude that the level of reading efficiency afforded by the crowding-free reading protocol Word Mode may return reading as a viable activity to many individuals with macular disease.