About This Project

Many people will experience a decline in vision at some point in their life. For many people, this may be easily corrected with glasses, but other types of vision loss are due to diseases that cannot be treated. Vision is a combination of the signal from the eye and how the brain deals with that signal. This project aims to understand how the brain understands a change in signal when you have eye disease. We hope to use this information in future to develop new low vision treatments.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

This project started when two researchers realised there was a missing link between theory and clinical reality. Jasleen has noticed how adaptable some of her low vision patients are compared to others, coming up with ways to help them navigate their new visual world. This meant that two patients with the same level of retinal damage, for example, could end up with very different quality of life. This sparked the idea for this project - could we understand the strategies the patients are using, and match these strategies to success in adaptation? In the longer-term, this may help us to predict who might need additional support to adapt, or even to help boost the use of these strategies, helping everyone make the most of the vision they have.

What is the significance of this project?

Reduced visual function is incredibly widespread. For many of us, we can use corrective glasses to help maintain good levels of vision. However, this is not always the case when eye disease is present. Losing your vision can be disruptive to your life and can limit independence. However, clinicians observe that the impact on everyday life differs across patients - some seem to adapt better than others. We want to take the first steps in understanding how to 1) measure this adaptability and 2) understand the strategies patients are using to solve challenging tasks.We are testing how the brain is using the visual information coming in from the eye. You can see more about how the eye and brain interact to give you vision here

What are the goals of the project?

We aim to recruit patients with low vision to take part in a one-session experiment. At this session, we will take detailed measurements of vision using eye charts adn a visual field machine. We will then assess how the brain is processing information using 2 computer based tasks. These tasks have been designed to test two important aspects of everyday vision: visual categorisation (what type of thing am I looking at?) and visual attention (focusing on the most useful parts of our visual environment). We will then compare the results from the computer tasks and the clinical tests to see how closely the spatial map of damage predicts task peformance. For example, does low vision lead to changes in the way the information is processed or how much we pay attention to it?