Effectiveness of Accommodative Aids in Reducing Empty Field Myopia in Visual Search

In: Human factors: the journal of the Human Factors Society, Band 20, Heft 6, S. 733-740

Abstract

When a visual detection task is performed with distant targets in the absence of adequate accommodative cues, a performance loss is obtained which has been attributed to empty field myopia. It is shown that in a visual search situation an accommodative aid located at optical infinity improves detection by approximately 30% over empty field performance. It is further demonstrated that such an aid may overcome the conflicting accommodative cues provided by proximal contours defining the search area, i.e., a situation that is analogous to the detection of distant targets by observers searching through aircraft cabin windows.