Progress on Recruitment

We've been working on recruiting patients into the study and data collection is ongoing. While we wait for the data to come in, I just thought I would explain a little more about our plans for the data analysis phase.

We are collecting three types of data: 1) microperimetry 2) task performance (accuracy and response times) and 3) eyetracking data (collected during task performance).

Each type of data tells us something different about visual function. Microperimetry gives us a map of retinal function - it tells us which parts of the "visual field" (i.e. the area of space you can see without moving) are healthy.

The data from our behavioural tasks then tells us how well people can use the information our eyes collect. We can make some strong predictions from the microperimetry about how participants should perform with different images - if we present the image in a "good" spot, they should do well, and they should do worse if the image falls in a "bad" spot. We are interested, however, in whether this distinction is so clearcut - do the regions of visual loss impair performance in other spatial locations?

Our behavioural tasks tap into a cognitive domain known selective spatial attention. This is a measure of how well you can direct your internal focus to a particular location in your visual field. We are interested in this measure because attention helps to improve the efficiency of our vision, such as when we are searching for a particular item in a room. We want to find out whether our patients who adapt to vision loss faster have more preserved attentional function, and whether particular profiles of retinal damage may be associated with improved/reduced performance.

Finally, our eyetracker data will be used to test how well our participants can maintain their gaze on a single point. We will also do more exploratory analyses with this data, asking, for example, whether patients with vision loss move shift their gaze around a screen differently to the control group.