Johnson Aaron P, Woods-Fry Heather, Wittich Walter
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montréal, Quebec, Canada 2CRIR/Centre de réadaptation MAB-Mackay du CIUSSS du Centre-Ouest-de-l'Île-de-Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada.
Department of Psychology, Ottawa University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2017 May 1;58(5):2520-2526. doi: 10.1167/iovs.16-21349.
Individuals with low vision often experience difficulties in performing tasks of daily living, such as face perception. This leads them to having difficulties with social interactions, as they can no longer correctly perceive the emotion of others. The present study investigated the effects of magnification on face perception in participants with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and their ability to detect and categorize emotions. It was hypothesized that patients with AMD would be less accurate in comparison to healthy controls, but that magnification would improve their performance to that of controls.
Faces containing happy, angry, or neutral emotion were both doubled (equivalent of arm's length distance) and decreased by half in size (equivalent of across the street). The ability to detect and to discriminate emotional content was compared between 20 AMD patients and 7 age-matched controls. Eye movements were recorded while conducting both tasks.
Regardless of stimulus size, when compared to controls, we observed that individuals with AMD consistently performed with lower accuracy in both emotion detection and categorization tasks. Moreover, having images undergo a 2-fold increase in size did improve performance, but did not equate AMD participants' performance to that of the controls in either the emotion detection or categorization task. Eye movements in AMD participants were highly variable in position compared to controls.
The data suggest that magnification alone does not appear to be the answer for improving emotion perception within individuals with low vision. Next steps should include an evaluation of the effects of viewing strategy.
视力低下的个体在进行日常生活任务时常常遇到困难，比如面部感知。这导致他们在社交互动方面存在困难，因为他们无法再正确感知他人的情绪。本研究调查了放大对年龄相关性黄斑变性（AMD）参与者面部感知的影响，以及他们检测和分类情绪的能力。研究假设，与健康对照组相比，AMD患者的准确性会更低，但放大可以将他们的表现提高到与对照组相当的水平。
包含快乐、愤怒或中性情绪的面部图像尺寸分别放大两倍（相当于一臂距离）和缩小一半（相当于街道对面）。比较了20名AMD患者和7名年龄匹配的对照组在检测和辨别情绪内容方面的能力，并在进行这两项任务时记录眼动情况。
无论刺激图像的大小如何，与对照组相比，我们观察到AMD患者在情绪检测和分类任务中的表现始终准确性较低。此外，将图像尺寸放大两倍确实提高了表现，但在情绪检测或分类任务中，AMD参与者的表现仍未达到对照组的水平。与对照组相比，AMD参与者的眼动位置高度可变。
数据表明，仅靠放大似乎无法改善视力低下个体的情绪感知。接下来的步骤应包括评估观看策略的效果。
