Visual deficiencies are common in clinical patients with long-term attention difficulties. As a result, it was critical to comprehend how poor visual input quality and other picture degradation led to poor performance on sustained attention tasks, particularly those involving dynamic and complex visual stimuli. Therefore, the influence of visual degradation on an adapted version of the gradual-onset continuous performance test (gradCPT), in which participants must identify between the gradually fading city and mountain sceneries, was explored by the researchers for a study. The activity, which included two blocks of six resolution and contrast levels, was completed by 36 normal-vision individuals. Subjects completed either a version with progressively fading images or static picture presentations. 

The results revealed that decreases in picture resolution affected performance under both types of temporal dynamics, but decreases in image contrast only harm performance under progressive temporal dynamics. In addition, image similarity investigations revealed that performance has a stronger relationship with an observer’s ability to acquire an image’s global spatial arrangement (i.e., gist) than local differences in pixel brightness, especially when images are shown gradually. According to the findings, gradually fading attention paradigms are susceptible to deficiencies in primary visual function, which might lead to these concerns being mistaken as attentional failures.

Reference:jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2778676

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