Abstract
Ageism has resulted in overstated expectations regarding the inevitable deterioration in human capabilities, such as visual perception, with age (Rowe and Kahn in Science, 237, 143–149, 1987; Grant in Health and Social Work, 21, 9–15, 1996). Human visual perception, however, is of a largely constructive nature, evidenced in the complementary interactions between top-down inputs (e.g., expectations) and bottom-up stimuli (Engel et al. in National Review of Neuroscience, 2(10), 704–716, 2001; Miller and Cohen in, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 167-202, 2001). Based on this constructive nature, we hypothesized that visual perception may be better than is typically expected. In three experiments, we demonstrated the malleability of visual acuity using a conditioning procedure involving manipulations in bottom-up stimuli. Experimental groups read a book excerpt with one letter in decreased font size, while the control groups read the same book excerpt with all letters in the same font size. Experiment 1 (N = 112) examined whether visual acuity could be enhanced for a specific letter. Experiment 2 (N = 70) assessed whether visual acuity could be enhanced for a non-conditioned letter, while Experiment 3 (N = 108) evaluated whether the visual conditioning effects would transfer to all non-conditioned letters. Visual acuity for experimental groups was significantly better than that in the control groups, speaking to the general malleability of our visual sense.
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Pirson, M., Ie, A. & Langer, E. Seeing What We Know, Knowing What We See: Challenging the Limits of Visual Acuity. J Adult Dev 19, 59–65 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-011-9132-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-011-9132-0